Once and After
by Shana the Short
Summary: By a sick twist of fate, the mission to Wave ends in disaster for Sakura. Terrified of her own home and the people she should trust the most, she finds herself on the run. When real life seems stranger than fiction, is there any way to carve out a normal life?
1. Fluke

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

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**ONCE AND AFTER**

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Prologue: Fluke

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_Once upon a time, there was a turtle, and a person who saved that turtle, and a box that caused said savior a great deal of distress indeed._

_But maybe not quite in that order._

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Keita glanced suspiciously behind him to the back of the cave the squadron had claimed as their camp for the time being. He wasn't a superstitious man, but a long, hardened life beginning in the midst of the Bloody Mist and shaped by decades of harsh and largely unrewarding attempts towards revolution which had taught him that caution and listening to his gut could save not only himself, but his comrades and subordinates as well.

And right now, his instincts were positively _screaming_ at him to grab his men and take them far, far away from the deceptively small wooden puzzle-box papered shut with ofuda and wrapped in five different layers of fabric to make sure it stayed that way.

Realistically, he knew that they could not afford to lose this particular 'asset', though personally he considered it to be little more than a time bomb, given what it contained. The power within would, if properly handled, give the village some power that was sorely needed in the wake of their long-sought and finally successful coup. The new change in regime was still on shaky legs, and kept so quiet that none but those directly involved in the shift knew much about it at all.

Realistically, he knew that their mission was to forge a weapon to protect their hard-won dream, but in his heart he couldn't help but resentfully wonder why the higher-ups were so set on creating a second Yagura while the first's ashes were still in the process of being tossed around and spat upon.

A faint clatter of metal on stone brought Keita's attention back to the other man left behind to guard the box. Izumi was one of the innumerable testaments to the cruelties of the previous Mizukage; he was a fuuinjutsu master of some ability, originally an Uzumaki prisoner-of-war who Yagura had broken like a poor-tempered horse.

The long, harrowing process had ended with the loss of the man's tongue and various loyalty and obedience seals being seared into his flesh. The once impetuous, hot-tempered man was now bowed and cowed by decades of slavery, his hair bleached white with age and his musculature atrophied by a diet of gruel and the heavy, chakra-draining manacles that had been clapped onto his wrists whenever he wasn't needed, stuffed away in a disgustingly small cell like an extra broom. Keita was no bleeding heart, but he was certainly far from Yagura's level. Some things just weren't _right._

"Sorry," he apologized. "It…It's just that I suddenly felt like that thing was watching us." He immediately felt foolish, but Izumi merely shrugged, slow and as though each muscle involved was being taxed to its limits by the meager motion. He was still broken, in ways that would probably never be mended before his death, but the absence of Yagura seemed to have allowed a tentative spark of life to re-enter the withered husk of his body.

The old man sluggishly curled his fingers into the only form of communication he could use at the moment. They had plenty of ink and chalk with them, but those materials were dedicated to a much more important purpose in this excursion.

'_Possible.'_

Keita was not filled with reassurance at that announcement, unsurprisingly. He had lost too many friends to the previous container of what lurked in the cage with them, was too used to associating the feel of its heinous chakra with massive carnage to ever be comfortable in its presence, shackled and muffled out as it was.

And they were here to shove its power within a young, autonomous being. He just didn't—well, no, he understood the logic perfectly. But that didn't mean he _liked_ it.

If things had gone their way, for once, they would have been able to use Izumi to prepare a suitable, stable vessel that they could mold and control at their leisure, but even in death Yagura seemed to be determined to spite them all. To put it politely, it was not merely the seal master's tongue that was taken during the initial onslaught against his spirit.

Once that had been determined, the hits had just kept on coming. First, there was the violent aversion most veterans had developed towards the chakra of the Sanbi, followed soon after by the blanket incompatibility of the few infants and young children the village had to offer and finally rounded out with the private but dreaded announcement that the seals keeping the demon locked away would not last the year.

That was six months ago.

It had been decades since the Uzumaki clan had been scattered like ants after their sand hill was destroyed. Still, desperate times called for desperate measures, and that led their motley crew here, to Wave Country: the closest island left near where the island of Uzu had made its last, self-destructive stand and sunk beneath the surf.

There was little hope left, considering the way the remains of the once-great clan had scurried for whatever sanctuary the Hidden Villages could offer, trading their secrets and skills for survival. But if any unattached Uzumaki were left, or even just a mongrel raised as a civilian, this would be the most likely spot to find them.

It was a slim chance, but they had long since run out of more convenient alternatives.

"Here's hoping we're just a pair of paranoid old bastards," Keita said, raising his flask in a makeshift toast.

Izumi stiltedly tilted his canteen in return, his craggy expression unchanging.

Not long after, the rest of their men returned. There was a suitably small body slung over Hazuki, the mission leader's shoulder, but the expression on the trio's faces told Izumi that there was something about the long-sought candidate that he would most definitely not be happy about.

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* * *

Haruno Sakura was not happy.

She wasn't quite at the level where her temper would blow, but she was definitely disgruntled. It might be easier if her woes had a single root, but as things stood she was the victim of multiple disadvantageous circumstances, some of which had since, most annoyingly, actually twisted around to benefit her.

First, her parents had left on business, to broker a deal with some merchant or another for some new deal. It was old hat in the Haruno household, to be true, but this time it coincided with her very first C-Rank mission, forcing her to scurry around and ransack her closet and supplies for what to pack without the valuable input of her well-traveled parents.

She had, grudgingly, shelved her pretty dresses for the occasion. Normally she would leap on the chance to show off in front of the boy she loved, but she had by chance overheard Ino bemoaning the loss of a particularly cute outfit after a stint guarding a caravan while restocking her first-aid field kit.

So her more cherished, higher-quality clothes were out, which included most of the blouses and dresses embossed with the clan crest. Sakura was left with the official uniforms her parents had purchased for her, still higher quality than most, given their connections, but there would be no tears shed over any rips or tears she managed to incur.

But she wasn't _happy_ about it, no matter how well the dark blue of the sleeveless turtlenecks suited her complexion. It just felt _wrong_, wearing a red spiral over her chest and across her back rather than the normal, elegant white ring. Maybe she would have to get used to it eventually, since chuunin and jounin both had it on their flak vests, but as it was it felt like a foreign weight rather than an honor.

The pants were just a necessary evil, no two ways about it. They were simple gray canvas with more pockets than Sakura knew what to do with, and she had a sneaking suspicion that they had originated from the men's section, since they actually came close to fitting her perfectly but did absolutely nothing for her slender form.

She was even deprived of a good, passive-aggressive sulk over the matter, because as soon as Kakashi—who was_ early_ for once, the horrible, contrary man—laid eyes on her, he was all smiles and praise for her professionalism.

Well, she wasn't sure if it was really for _her_ sake, considering how Naruto and Sasuke-kun had shuffled and glared at the pointed, elated way the man waxed poetic about her sensible decisions for her traveling clothes.

Their client was sluggish, and by the time he trudged to the gate, bloody-eyed and churlish, Naruto had somehow been shamed into trading his orange tracksuit for stock gray pants and a black jacket with white piping on the sleeves that Kakashi had, after a long and heavy pause, deemed an 'acceptable' alternative.

Sasuke-kun had clenched his jaw, but left and reappeared in a purple, zip-up over-shirt with its wide, iconic collar folded down and a much less eye-catching uchiwa as the zipper itself. Sakura had been torn between guilt at being the cause for the object of her affections being inconvenienced and delight at him not having a swathe of fabric readily available to hide his handsome features for once.

Tazuna himself quickly negated any particular high notes that the mission itself might offer, however.

When that man wasn't swilling down cheap booze, he was complaining—about being 'shafted' with a squad of children, with the apparently mercenary prices of the average Konoha inn and restaurant businesses, with the state of the roads that Kakashi chose for their route, to the cheekiness of the brats he was shafted with.

Sakura, who had until that point done her level best to mitigate Naruto's inherent…Naruto-ness, was understandably incensed by the offhand bellyaching. Sasuke-kun was also decidedly less than charmed by the complaint. If it weren't for Kakashi's seemingly random interventions, the genin of his squad might have showcased just how 'cheeky' they could be.

Sakura managed to end the complaining finally, but the cure turned out to be nearly as bitter as the original ailment itself. Once a few innocent questions about the bridge-builder himself were tossed out, the old man just would _not_ shut up. Her cheeks were cramping from the effort of maintaining the polite smile she had pasted up.

She nodded every so often, taking in maybe one word for every ten and taking every one with a generous helping of salt. It was a taxing task, but she was the only one on their team qualified to do it, given that Kakashi-sensei was busy keeping Naruto and Sasuke-kun's grudging peace in tact. Sakura couldn't fault him for that, though in her admittedly poor mood she had definitely tried once or twice. Six times tops, really.

She sighed, as quietly as possible, and did her very best to find some entertainment in the bridge-builder's bragging.

"—_fifteen_ of my men tried and failed…at the same time!" Tazuna crowed, waving his booze for emphasis. "They were forced to bow to my superior skills, and the dispute at the site was settled. They've all been faultlessly loyal to me since, and never tossed so much as another glance at my precious Tsunami again."

There was something strange and unsettling about a construction worker naming his only child after a massively destructive force of nature, but she was a pink-haired girl named Sakura. She didn't exactly have many stones she could cast on that front.

"But there _was_ somebody worthy of her eventually, wasn't there?" Sakura asked, angling for a slightly more engaging love story rather than another manly tall tale. "I mean, you said that you had a grandson, right?"

"Ah, yes." His alcohol-flushed face brightened with pride. "Inari, my cute little grandson! He's at his rebellious age right now, but still as adorable as ever." He scratched his beard slowly. "And now that you mention it…there was one man. Not the trash she married first," he explained airily. "Certainly not him. The only good thing about _that_ lout was that he helped bring Inari into the world. But my second son-in-law…now _there_ was a real man!"

Two things stopped Sakura from pursuing that line of conversation further; the first being the two bladed-chains that circled Kakashi-sensei and pulled horrifically taut, and the second being the wire that looped around her ankle and dragged her bodily into the forest. She saw a dark gloved hand swooping down, and for a time knew no more.

* * *

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* * *

"A leaf-nin?!" Keita scrubbed his face tiredly, glaring at the offensive metal plate tied on the top of the girl's head. "Are you—this is _not_ a good idea, Hazuki!" Temporary commanding officer or not, Keita reserved the right to call a spade a spade and a fool a fool.

"Look," said Hazuki, his voice harsh as Yuki and Toru shuffled nervously behind him. "We need an Uzumaki, and I'd bet my life that she makes the cut. We've developed plenty of techniques for Yagura—sure, they never _kept_ him down, but they debilitated him pretty well when he couldn't get help. We just need her until we can get a better vessel."

"We also need to run like hell from the Copy-nin," Yuki added, rubbing his neck worriedly. "Apparently, he herds kids and old men now."

Keita wondered if the burning in his gut was a dark omen, simple despair, or the beginnings of a stress-induced ulcer. "Of course. Of _course_ Hatake gods-damned Kakashi would be involved with this." He felt, suddenly and massively, an overwhelming relief that he and the others were still wearing their marred emblems. If this went south, then at the very least the village would not be implicated. "It's never simple."

Izumi, on the other hand, had spent his time far more valuably than his fellow guard. He had laid out the girl, binding her hands from wrist to fingertip, removed her shoes to be safe, and tied her knees and ankles as well. He rucked up her shirt and tugged down the hem of her pants with slow, methodical motions. Without any hurry or nerves, he removed a small glass bottle from a pocket in his vest, covered with ofuda so thoroughly that the contents were a mystery.

He carefully unwrapped one and uncorked the container, up-ending the bottle and pressing the lip to her abdomen. When he lifted the bottle way, a small shard of what Izumi realized was a shard of one of the monster's scales was resting gently between where the girl's Gates of View and Wonder should lie. The old man pressed his hand over it and channeled chakra briefly, before stepping back to deliver the verdict.

'_Small reserves. Growing coils. Precise control. Girl is suitable.'_ He signed laboriously.

"They haven't started training her as a sensor?" Hazuki asked, to be certain. That was usually what was done with Uzumaki women that lacked the natural reserve-boost that cropped up in their clan. Or had been, back during the war.

Izumi shook his head, raising his hands again. _'No specialization yet. Girl is suitable.'_

"…we're probably going to have to do the sealing now," Toru noted with a faint note of dismay in his gruff voice. "If Hatake's near by, he'll dog after us as soon as he figures out where we are."

"Yeah." Hazuki sighed, rubbing his eyes tiredly. Keita couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy, despite his leader being mostly at fault for their need to rush. It seemed like they had to do everything the hard way, these days. "Keita, you take north. Yuki, opposite for south. I'll take the east corner, so that will leave you on the west, Toru. If we're up against Hatake, then we'll have a few hours at best before he picks up our trail. Get started, Izumi."

The squad blurred into motion. Fortunately for Keita, the mouth of their cave face the north, so he would be the only pillar of the barrier to miss witnessing the sealing. Well, he used that term loosely—he would be keeping his eyes firmly locked on the outside, both out of necessity and out of a deep-seated desire to not see what he personally considered to be a crime against humanity.

Almost literally, since they were all but stealing the girl's humanity.

But Keita was a survivor of the Bloody Mist, and had learned to stamp out guilt. The sacrifice of the girl would mean a huge step towards stability for his village, and if his comrades had laid down their lives for such a thing, the life of one girl was hardly a steep price. Keita kept his eyes to the north and did his best not to be alarmed by the soft sounds of ink being poured and brushes being dragged across stone.

The preparations seemed to take forever, sealing matrix after sealing matrix being inscribed with Izumi's slow, careful strokes, unhurried despite the infamous, white-maned death doubtlessly searching them out, coming closer every second. It felt like an eternity before a softer pop and a quiet clatter of treated wood signaled that Izumi had moved on to applying the necessary major seals to the girl herself.

It couldn't have taken more than two hours in total for all of the preparations, but to Keita it felt like days. Still, once he heard the gentle rustle of cloth being untied and the near-silent hiss of the ofuda being peeled away, he found himself wishing, impossibly, that the old expert had taken longer with his craft. But with a few small clicks of lacquered wood being pressed and shifted and then balanced, gently, on the center of the matrix mapped out on the girl's skin, the wheels were set into motion.

The hairs on the back of Keita's neck rose as _that_ chakra began leaking out, but he stubbornly refused to let it interfere with the portion of his concentration dedicated to the barrier. It was the only thing keeping the monster and the sealing process from broadcasting their location to every creature with even a slight sensitivity to chakra within a hundred mile radius, and would ideally buy them precious time to escape with the girl before Hatake's hounds could get a lock on their scents.

The girl started screaming at one point, raw and primal in a way that chilled Keita to the bone, but was promptly muffled by something Izumi did. That was when the air of the cave was saturated the thickest with the beast's aura, so Keita couldn't blame her. She fell quiet not long after, and the oppressive chakra gradually drained away.

When he heard Hazuki's slow, relieved exhale, Keita chanced a look back. The cave was free of any seals, now, but the final product was still setting on her skin, a complex grid of swirls and squiggles to his untrained eye. The girl was limp and glassy-eyed in the aftermath, and her undergarments had been pushed aside so that she was completely bare from collarbone to mid-thigh. She was a tiny thing, so he supposed Izumi had needed all the canvas he could get.

Izumi himself was nursing a bleeding forearm, which Keita realized was because he had used it to silence the girl and keep her from biting her tongue off during the sealing.

He had a moment to relish their success, before a furious, near inhuman snarl and what sounded like the chirping of birds alerted him to the attack rocketing towards the barrier.

He strengthened it as much as he could, keeping his eyes rooted to the ground, but Hatake's rage was palpable as the energy of his attack crackled uselessly across the only thing standing between himself and the men who had poached his student.

Keita swallowed thickly, and hoped that the man would run out of chakra before they did. For a time, as Hatake tried and failed to break through like a man possessed, it seemed as though they might actually get a break.

Naturally, that didn't last.

"Izumi?!" Keita heard Yuki yelp. "The hell are you doing, old ma—urk…!" The team's youngest member's voice trailed off into a wet gurgle Keita had heard too many times _not_ to recognize it. Still, his head turned involuntarily to see the young man clutch at his cut throat and stumble back against the cave wall as his murderer slowly and methodically dropped his blade and made his way back to the new jinchuuriki's side.

The loyalty and obedience seals were already exacting their punishment, blood beginning to pool from his eyes and ears and mouth and nose, dripping and sliding down the hollowed crevices of his face, but Izumi looked happier and more peaceful than Keita could ever remember seeing him. He knelt down and gently folded the girl's fingers around the puzzle-box that had led them here, smoothed her hair back with his own, still-steady fingers, pressed a soft kiss to her brow, and finally slumped over, dead.

Yuki quickly followed suit, limp against the rock and dirt.

Keita had a moment of perfect, hateful clarity when he remembered just how recklessly, viciously sentimental the Uzumaki clan had always been and cursed himself for ever forgetting just how potent and volatile a weapon those emotions could be when used properly.

And then the barrier unraveled and Hatake descended upon them with the vigor and bitterness of a mad wolf, and Keita heard the birds once more and saw the flickering light. And then he knew no more.

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_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,624

_**Total Word Count:**_ 3,624


	2. Evoke

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

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**ONCE AND AFTER**

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Evoke

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Sakura woke up to the feel of cold, wet bristles on skin that should most definitely not be on display, but could not for the life of her force her thoughts together enough to decide whether to be infuriated, scared, or disturbed. She felt as though she were floating, but could only see strange, flickering shapes.

She realized, after some time, that she was looking at some sort of rocky ceiling, and that she had probably been drugged, which might have terrified her. Well, if she hadn't been sedated, that is.

She tried, experimentally, to wiggle her fingers, then her toes, and failed on both accounts. The brush did not pause in its strokes, but every so often a hollow-cheeked, aged man with a shock of thick white hair drifted in and out of her limited range of vision, as tilting her head seemed like it would take all of her current willpower and then some.

Time slipped by, though how much she could not say. But all too soon enough, her entire world exploded into mind-numbing pain. The sliver of her mind that wasn't entirely addled might have been relieved at that, since it signified that the drug had been burned out of her system, if it weren't for the fact that every last nerve ending in her body was screaming out for the previous haze of oblivion.

Gradually, the pain drove her down and her vision grayed at the edges as her eyes forcefully blurred and unfocused. Her head throbbed and ached, as though it was being stuffed to the point of splitting, but it was more manageable compared to the absolute, searing agony she had been eased away from.

Figuratively, her mind was curled up in a fetal position, crying softly and doing its best to ignore the massive overload of memory and intelligence ghosting tentatively along its edges. After a while, the foreign intrusion seemed to cotton on to her situation and carefully withdrew, finally allowing her mind and body the chance to recover from the sudden shock.

It chose a poor time, all things considered, because once her vision finally cleared and the rest of her senses returned to her, Sakura found herself surrounded by death on all sides.

Brutal, unforgiving, vicious death.

The cave was thick with the scent of what she identified, with a cautious look around that she almost immediately regretted, as charred flesh and blood, and the other types of bile and waste that tagged at death's heels. Sakura tried to clap a hand over her mouth as she gagged, and promptly discovered that it wasn't just the drug that had kept her extremities immobile. That was swiftly followed by the revelation of just how _much_ of her body was on display, and she immediately rolled onto her stomach, desperate to protect her modesty, no matter how belated.

Tears of humiliation and fear pricked at the corners of her eyes, but her new position naturally directed her gaze towards two pairs of feet: one dangling just shy of the rough floor, and the other planted firmly apart at shoulder-distance. The feet of the last man left standing in the cave led to ankles wrapped in bandages and familiar, dark, slightly worn and once-darned uniform pants. Sakura craned her neck up and saw her teacher half-obscuring a limp man sporting a high, dark ponytail.

"Khhaah," she rasped weakly, and broke into a short, shallow coughing fit. Her throat felt raw and abused, and she swallowed what little saliva she could manage to summon and tried again. "Khhhh…Kaka…kashi…sss…" She wheezed and tried again, but all that came out was a soft, rusty sort of squeak.

It was enough, though, and her teacher turned. Sakura seized up, filled with a strange and all-possessing terror at the sight of his arm embedded within the chest of the unknown man. It was more than just the knee-jerk horror at the sight of a murder freshly perpetrated.

In that instant she was strangely certain that she knew just what that corpse had gone through, and it scared her in ways she could not even begin to explain.

Kakashi-sensei pulled his arm loose with a sickening, indescribable noise and turned, with an expression that seemed, as little of it as was available for scrutiny, as though his world was ending. "Sakura…" He trailed off, his voice soft and bloated with far too many emotions for Sakura to even begin identifying in her current state.

He took a step towards her, his hand raised, and then things somehow managed to take an even sharper turn into the strange.

Her vision tinted green and gray and _bubbled_, as though she had been plunged to the bottom of a murky pond. Kakashi-sensei recoiled, squeezing his eye shut. It was difficult for her to really see much at the moment, but for some reason she thought he might be crying. It didn't ease the terrified pace her heart had exploded into, and she wondered, suddenly, if this all wasn't just the result of a much-deserved fit of hysteria.

She hiccupped and gasped for breath, curling in on herself and trying desperately to calm herself down. Eventually the fear-driven desperation died off, and she became aware of a slow, rhythmic noise. It was Kakashi-sensei, who had fallen to his knees a safe distance away, and he was repeating the same two words, over and over and over again.

"_I'm sorry."_

He looked like a broken man, and Sakura felt unspeakably frustrated that she ever thought, even for a second, that he might hurt her. She squirmed onto her knees, bent over to cover herself as much as possibly, and scooted over towards him. She winced at the way her bound knees scraped and wobbled, but it seemed to remind Kakashi-sensei that there were more effective uses of his time than simple apologies.

He reached into his weaponry pouch and slowly withdrew a kunai, so as not to spook her again, but somehow the blade lessened the fear she felt when his hand same near her. He severed the bindings on her hands as gently as possible, and tilted his head away as she scrambled to tug her clothes back into some semblance of order. Her bra had been cut clean through, and was a loss, but the rest left her in a far more modest state than she was previously.

She shifted to sit so he could do the same for her knees and ankles, and only realized once he extended a hand to help her stand that she was clutching a small, beautifully painted wooden box in a death grip. She pried loose one hand, and Kakashi-sensei used it as a means to scoop her up bodily, allowing her to perch heavily on his forearm as he stapped over another charred corpse and walked briskly out of the cave.

"I'm sorry," he said again, distracting her from her horrified inspection of the whole bloody tableau. The old man nearest to where she had been had caught her eye, as he was the only one not wearing some expression of terror or alarm. He looked…happy, even if his face was a bloody mess.

"Whh…?" She let out a frustrated grunt and banged her forehead against his shoulder. She tried again, but kept her voice quiet. "Wh-Why…do you keep…s-saying that?" Sakura demanded. "You…s-saved me."

"No," said Kakashi-sensei, and a bit of the brokenness was definitely still there, lurking just beneath the unusually solemn surface. "No, I didn't."

* * *

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* * *

Naruto was a ball of nervous energy, bouncing this way and that along the edges of Sasuke's periphery. He struggled against the familiar insults that rose up, knowing that in his own way he was just as high-strung as the dead-last by the unsettling twists that had been heaped on them.

He slid his gaze towards the probable cause of the team's misfortunes, and clenched his jaw so tight he felt a muscle twitch in protest. Clients lied—that was a fact hammered in during the later years of the Academy, after the civilian and shinobi classes diverged completely. There was always _some_ detail that a client would hold back, either for benign reasons, such as not thinking it would matter in the grand scheme of things, or for…less benign resons.

Considering the two corpses strung up on a nearby tree and the conspicuous absence of half of their squad, Sasuke thought that it was rather obvious just which category the old drunkard fell into.

Oh, sure; the man _looked_ repentant now, but whether it was because he had possibly gotten their teammate killed to save some cash or just because he got caught in one of the most damning lies he could have spun.

Naruto's head snapped to the side, his expression lighting up hopefully. Sasuke turned to follow his line of sight with much more caution, but a moment later Kakashi leapt down from the tree line and—though Sasuke would deny it until his dying day—something deep within him unclenched at the sight of Sakura hooked protectively in the crook of their teacher's arm.

"Sakura-chan!" Naruto rocketed towards the wayward pair with his usual reckless abandon, stopping short as Kakashi bent to let her down. Sasuke noticed, with no little confusion, that aside from her normal pack she had also been relieved of her shoes at some point. He carefully looked her over once more as she straightened, and found changes that…unsettled him.

Her wrists and hands were reddened and she moved them gingerly, a textbook after-effect of tight binding. Her posture was…Sasuke wasn't sure _what_ it was, exactly, but it wasn't normal. During their short, unavoidable time together, he had gotten a front row seat for what he had previously thought to be the full gamut of her emotions, but her body language now confused him. She was hunched, and fiddling with something small, black, and glossy with short, nervous motions.

And she wouldn't look up.

"We're returning to the village," Kakashi said, in a tone that brooked no argument. "Immediately." Tazuna did not speak up, but whether that was because he agreed or was still cowed by Kakashi's initial interrogation following the deaths of the self-proclaimed Demon Brothers and the discovery that neither had been responsible for Sakura's absence. "Sakura nee…ds…"

Sasuke frowned, watching the man stagger forward, but he quickly realized the cause. He had been shocked, to say the least, when Kakashi had revealed his Sharingan, but there had been no time to question him. He had barked out that if he used it sparingly, he should be able to return with Sakura, but they would have to be prepared to deal with his deadweight if he overexerted himself, and then leapt into the forest, a thumb raised to his mouth.

"Chakra exhaustion," he deduced aloud for his less intelligent and less informed teammates, respectively. "But we have our orders."

He reached back into his pack and pulled out his extra roll of bandages, moving towards Sakura. None of them were carrying extra shoes, and even if Kakashi wouldn't be using his they were so overlarge that they would only get in the way, so it was the best they could do until they returned to the village.

But then the strangest thing so far happened. Sakura flinched away. From _him._

…no, perhaps 'flinched' put it too mildly. When she looked up and saw him coming, she went still for a moment, and then terror suddenly bloomed through her; her skin paled, her pupils dilated, her shoulders hunched in and, most insultingly and befuddling of all, her hand shot out and gripped Naruto's sleeve in a desperate, silent cry for help. For protection.

From _Sasuke._

He stopped and stared at her, and in his confusion noticed another new detail that marked the dawning of a horrible, horrible inkling of what might have happened in the past few hours.

Sakura was not wearing a bra anymore, which Sasuke knew not because he was any sort of pervert, but because he had trained to notice minute differences in wardrobe to make his Henge more accurate and the bra she had been wearing had a ribbon on the front, and the sleeveless uniform shirt she had showed up in at the gate had been tight enough to show a softened outline of it.

He turned his head slowly, and noted, as alarm bells began ringing in the back of his head, that the two dead rogue ninja were both dark haired.

He shoved out his arm, as though trying to push away the terrible, disturbing understanding that his brain was trying to form. "…here. You should wrap your feet. Naruto can handle Kakashi." His feet were rooted to the ground. He couldn't take another step forward, couldn't test if it was a fluke or forming trauma, couldn't deal with the idea that Sakura…that she had been…

He glanced up when she reached out to take the rolled-up strips of linen, but she kept her gaze stubbornly averted. She wet her lips and swallowed, but when she opened her mouth to say something she visibly faltered.

"…th-thanks, Sasuke-kun." Her voice was slightly hoarse—he _refused_ to think from what—and the normal level of simpering cheer coating the words were a shade of its regular state, but even the effort on her part was reassuring.

Not that Sasuke needed to be reassured. Kakashi had gotten her back. She was alive, and that was better than…his mind recoiled from the long-suppressed images that tried to resurface.

She was _alive_. That was what mattered.

"Hey, Bastard," Naruto's voice, grating as ever, snapped him out of his thoughts once again. "Come help me assemble a…hammock...carrier…thingy."

"It's called a _stretcher_, idiot," Sasuke shot back, carefully maneuvering around Sakura as she slowly knelt down to wrap her feet, placing what he now saw was a painted box close by as she worked.

Sasuke looked away from her to focus on pulling out the extendable rods and stretchy, thin material from the professional medical pack he had taken from one of the various storage units he had inherited after The Incident. He became aware very quickly that Naruto was not prepping Kakashi, or making clones, or even turning the man over so he wasn't slumped in the dirt. He was watching Sakura, his eyes more shadowed than Sasuke could ever remember seeing them.

Sasuke realized, with an unpleasant jolt, that he could actually see the moment Naruto considered the possibility he himself was trying desperately to ignore. "We have our orders," he bit out, and Naruto startled back into his normal mask of stupid cheer. "So get moving. We need to get Kakashi back and…and report."

And get Sakura whatever help the only other person who knew what happened to her thought she needed.

Naruto nodded, first unsure and then with the same resolve he had showed when he stabbed his hand earlier. And Sasuke _fully_ intended to ask just how he managed to heal so quickly, once they were back home and the other pressing matters surrounding this quagmire of a mission were dealt with accordingly.

"Yeah!" Naruto grinned, blinding and all for show, but Sasuke didn't have any illusions that it was for his benefit. He heard Sakura finish behind him and stand again. "Kaka-sensei'll be _super_ mad if he wakes up and we're still on the road. Sakura-chan, do you think you could stick with the old geezer? I can lend you some weapons since yours…" he faltered briefly, but pressed on. "Since you don't have yours right now. You can pay me back later."

Sasuke didn't hear anything as he put the finishing touches on the cheap, lightweight stretcher, but Naruto removed his shuriken pouch and tossed it over his shoulder, so Sakura must have nodded.

Two more Narutos popped into existence and set about rolling their limp instructor onto the tarp. It was far from a tailored fit and his legs hung over the end from mid-calve down, but it would have to do. Sasuke stood as well, clapping the dirt from his shorts.

He grit his teeth at the way Sakura unconsciously cowered away from him as he passed by Tazuna's opposite side. For once, Naruto didn't argue when he took point in the formation, and they set out.

Their pace was far from ideal, given that one of them was essentially barefoot, one was a civilian on his way to explain that he had lied to a military government, and one of them was essentially dead weight, but there was nothing they could really do to change things for the better at this point. The sun was already beginning to sink below the leafy canopy above them, and Sasuke knew they would have to make camp sooner or later instead of doubling back in one go.

But he intended to get as much ground covered as they possibly could.

* * *

.

* * *

Sakura stared into the fire, her chin perched on top of her knees and her fingers curled around her bare ankles. Sasuke and Naruto had insisted she be taken off of the normal rotation for watch, so technically she should be sleeping, but she had so much to think about that it seemed impossible at this point.

She knew that the boys had gotten the wrong idea, but she wasn't sure how to even begin correcting them; _she_ didn't even really know what had been done to her. After his cryptic, guilt-ridden answer outside of the cave, Kakashi-sensei had effectively clammed up. Sakura probably could have torn a proper exclamation out of him if she had really pressed, but he had seemed so…_bereaved_ about the matter that she was too scared to press the issue. Too scared to know the truth.

Too scared of _Kakashi-sensei_ himself, even though he had saved her. She didn't understand that, or why she had wanted to run screaming when she had finally been reunited with her beloved Sasuke-kun.

She shivered violently despite the balmy warmth of the evening and the toastiness from her proximity to the fire.

That had been the worst. She had been revolted, chilled, filled with pure despair at the thought of being within arms reach of him. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to focus on the somewhat uncomfortable sensation of the box pressed between her thighs and stomach. It helped center her, and slowly she pulled herself away from those infectious, inexplicable feelings.

She still wasn't sure what the box's part was in all of this, but she had faint, disjointed impressions of cool, leathery fingers loosening her bindings to place it between her hands. She pressed her cheek against one knee and sighed. The old man was a frustrating enigma. His body had been the one closest to her, which arguably meant he had been the most active perpetrator in…whatever had been done to her, and his body was the only one that wasn't Kakashi-sensei's handiwork.

But he had been smiling. His face was painted in his own blood, but he had died with a _smile_.

Sakura was scared, ignorant, and in sore need of any answers, and it felt like that old man—and the box, which was the last trace of him she had—were the only avenues to get them. If Kakashi-sensei was any indication, once she returned to the village, she would be in for more nights like this.

"Sakura-chan."

She jumped, a little, and it stung to realize that if it had been Sasuke-kun's voice then she would have _screamed_. She turned to look at Naruto, who held a bedroll out to her.

"I'm going on watch now, so you can use mine," he said, and for once he wasn't insinuating anything or trying overly hard to get into her good graces. He paused, then smiled, and for some reason Sakura thought of the old man again. "You should seriously try and get some sleep, okay? We can handle watch for one night."

Slowly, she uncoiled herself and took the sleeping bag with a murmur of thanks. She wondered, suddenly and full of guilt, if it was Naruto who was making the suggestion because the boys wanted to avoid a repeat performance of the bandages.

Naruto left, and Sakura slipped inside, her back to the fire. She squeezed her eyes shut when she heard Sasuke-kun reenter the campsite not long after, hating the way her body tensed when his footsteps paused briefly. He settled down on the opposite side of the fire so that Tazuna, snoring loudly, was perpendicular above them, with the still form of Kakashi towards their feet. She apologized silently, her shoulders hunching, and tried to sleep. She hoped, probably in vain, that things would magically be better in the morning or that she would at least recover the ability to look her crush in the eye.

Eventually, her breath evened out, and she slipped into a deep, exhausted slumber.

And then, strangely, Sakura slipped even deeper.

* * *

.

* * *

_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,507

_**Total Word Count:**_ 7,131


	3. Feeble

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Feeble

* * *

.

* * *

When Sakura was younger, around four or five, her parents brought her to the sea for the first time, and it was like nothing she had ever experienced in her life. After years of only knowing the odd river, but mostly just the massive, imposing walls and mountain that ringed in her home, the ocean seemed like an entire world unto itself. It was massive and glittered like one of the jewels her father occasionally brought home before passing them onto clients, and it was forever in motion.

She stood at that shore now, a little girl once more. She was in a swimsuit she had half-forgotten, a pale pink one-piece with a fluttery yellow skirt attached, and a pair of glitter-speckled plastic sandals dangled from one hand. She wriggled her toes into the sand and smiled as the surf washed in, splashing over her ankles and shins and then dragging back out.

She actually knew she was dreaming for once, which was a treat, and did her best not to think about why, exactly, she was dreaming about something that happened when she was a child. That was exactly the sort of thing that triggered the shift of a good, simple dream to something strange or bizarre that would leave her grumpy and uncertain as to why upon waking.

A jeer and a soft, alarmed cry rose above the sound of the next wave crashing in, and Sakura turned with some trepidation to see whatever oddity her brain had decided to throw at her this time. She was not, unfortunately, disappointed.

Down the beach, there was a boy with black hair and swim trunks with his back to her, and something small and gray was squirming and crying at his feet.

Now, there was a special trait to Sakura that very few people knew about. She wasn't mentally unsound or ill, technically; an unkind assessment might merely designate her as 'two-faced' to the extreme, but that wasn't entirely accurate. A kinder interpretation would make notes of still waters and hidden depths, and that, perhaps, came close to describing her situation. She did her best to keep up a gentle, smiling, kind visage as much as possible, and as a result her pent up, hidden true feelings grew potent and…admittedly, a tad exaggerated. If they stayed in her head, she didn't have to deal with poor consequences, after all.

Sometimes, she failed and exploded; that seemed to be happening more and more these days, thanks to increased exposure to Naruto. But by and large, Sakura did not have the courage to voice her true feelings on matters. She chattered, and giggled, and slid in subject-changes, but outside of the odd (and increasingly, Naruto-induced) accident, she kept her rage and passions carefully locked away behind a cute, up-beat mask.

But this, here and now, was not in the real world. This was in her_ head_ and even if Sakura had been the very picture of a shrinking violet when she was physically five, she wasn't that lonely little girl anymore. Well…she was in most ways, actually, but the time between then and now had left her with one very important difference: her temper. And in her head, in this dream, this boy wasn't anybody she had to be scared of going off on.

"Hey!" She was running before she finished deciding just what she was going to do, her small feet splashing through the next wave and her soft voice high and taut with anger she never expressed at five. "Stop that!"

Not the most impressive of battle cries, admittedly, but it got the boy to halt whatever he was doing and turn to face her. If it wasn't a dream, she might have screamed; the boy's face, if it could be called that, looked as though somebody had gripped the center and _twisted_, leaving nothing, no eyes or nose or mouth, _nothing_ but a swirl of flesh. Inexplicably, Sakura thought of Sasuke-kun, and shivered.

"I _said,_ quit it!" She barked when the boy-thing made no move to step away from the creature he was tormenting. It _looked_ like a turtle, curled up as it was, except that Sakura couldn't remember ever seeing a gray turtle before. It was hardly stranger than a faceless boy-creature though, so she shrugged it off as dream logic and pegged one of her sparkly pink shoes at the turtle's tormenter.

The sandal sunk through him soundlessly and his body…the only way Sakura could describe the result of her hotheaded toss was that his body _rippled_. It would have been grotesque to see in real life, but the magic of dream logic kept the horror the sight should have evoked at bay. He faded with each bulge and bounce of his flesh, until the last wisps of his presence had faded away and Sakura was free to crouch down and inspect his victim.

"It's okay now," she said, in the same soft, quiet tones that Ino had once used to coax her to look up the fateful afternoon they had met. "He's gone." She wasn't exactly certain why he had been here to begin with, but she was filled with certainty that he wouldn't be back any time soon.

The turtle slowly uncurled itself, and by that point the strangeness of the dream had wrapped itself around Sakura so thoroughly that she did not even blink as the turtle uncurled its head and three long, segmented, armored tails, tilted its half-obscured face so that it could look at her, and spoke up in a soft, polite manner. "Thank you."

A talking turtle seemed like the most normal twist of fancy so far, so Sakura smiled and nodded. "You're welcome." She lowered her voice conspiratorially, perhaps a bit more affected by her de-aged state than she had previously thought. "I really, really don't like bullies."

"…I don't either," the turtle agreed, shuffling in the sand so that he—and the voice revealed the turtle was definitely male, and young at that—could converse with her more comfortably. "But that wasn't…well, he _was_ certainly a bully…but that was a nightmare of him. Not _actually _him." His tails rose and fell one by one, in a wavelike motion. It seemed to be a nervous habit, because a moment later he spoke up again, apparently worried that she might have taken his words the wrong way. "I am still thankful, all the same."

"I don't like nightmares either," Sakura said with a shrug. "I didn't know parts of dreams could get them too." It was a rather sad thought, really.

"Ah." The turtle said, and his tails raised and fell in the same rhythmic order. "Um. Yes. That would be because, as it so happens, I am _not_ a dream." He seemed very apologetic about that point, and bizarrely, it kept Sakura from being especially alarmed by the revelation.

Well. That and the fact that she was absolutely certain that they were still in her head.

"Are you part of a genjutsu, then?" Sakura asked, interest slipping into her voice. She had never heard of an illusion like this, but it might explain the strange twists that had occurred over the past day. Not that Kakashi-sensei had told them much about genjutsu at all—even after prying and sweet-talking and even, in a moment of weakness, whining her case, he had not even explained the mechanics of the technique he had used on _her_ during the bell test. He just made them run drills and work on their teamwork and basic taijutsu. _Ugh._

"I'm a demon," the turtle said, cutting off any more guesses.

Sakura pursed her lips, the motion clumsy with her smaller mouth, and gave the alleged demon a long, pointed look. Even if he had some rather…exotic…features, he wasn't much larger than a dinner plate. She couldn't see _him_ destroying a village any time soon.

His head slid back towards his shell a little, as though he could sense her disbelief. "I'm not usually this size!" He insisted, a tad defensively. "I…actually, I don't believe I've _ever_ been this small before, even as a child. But I believed it would be in both our best interests to approach you in your own territory, so to speak."

"So, this _is_ a dream," Sakura said, just to be sure. "My dream."

"Yes it is," agreed the turtle. "But I'm as real as you are."

"Okay," Sakura hugged her knees, narrowing her eyes at him and huffing damp bangs out of her face. "So…why is a demon talking to me in my dream?"

"Because I _desperately_ want a better living situation this time."

"…what?"

"Forgive me," the turtle heaved a small sigh, dropping his head. "It has been…quite some time since I was last able to converse with anybody, so my skill when it come to lightening the mood has deteriorated. It…" He hesitated, and his tails rose and fell in the interim. "It was not…considerable to begin with, so I apologize for the poor attempt."

"It's fine." Sakura waved it off. "But can I please just get a straight answer? I mean, I don't know if that violates some sort of…I don't know, _dream law_, but—"

"It doesn't," replied the turtle, with less certainty than Sakura might have like, but she fell silent, mollified for the moment. His tail went through four separate waves as he sought the right words. "…are you familiar with the concept of sealing something within something else?"

Sakura felt a suspicion take root. Well, two, actually, but she chose to voice the one that was less alarming. "You're inside the box that old man gave me, aren't you?"

"Close," the turtle said. "I _was_ inside of the box. And before that I _was_ inside of a merciless madman. And now, I am inside of you, miss."

"…you're…inside of me?" It came out as a feeble question, but even as she tried to pass it off as an absurdity, her own logical mind struggled against her. It made sense, in a sick, crazy sort of way. Fuuinjutsu was a complicated field, but Kakashi-sensei was certain to know more about the subject than she did. It would explain his comment, certainly. But Sakura didn't want to believe it. "That doesn't…that shouldn't be possible. How can you seal one living creature into another?"

"It _is_ possible." There was bitterness in the turtle's soft voice. "My honored brothers and I have learned that terrible lesson time and time again. You are actually quite close to another testament to just how possible this all is. Ku-oniisama resides within your…" He half withdrew into his shell again and shuddered, but forced himself to finish. "Within your teammate. The one that _isn't_…dangerous."

Sakura understood instantly that he meant Naruto, and through that understanding divined the source of her strange, sudden phobia of Sasuke-kun. She might have lashed out at him for making things so complicated, but he looked so small and vulnerable against the sand that she didn't have the heart.

And then, with almost comical belatedness, what the turtle's words had actually been _intended_ to convey registered.

"Naruto has a demon inside of him?!" She felt like a parrot, but the words felt as though they should not have made any sense when strung together. "But…no, that's…" She shook her head, her short pink hair flying from side to side. "That can't be true! Where would…he even…"

Sakura's eyes drifted to the turtles three tails, each of which was now still beneath her scrutiny. With a slow, terrible sort of weight, the last piece of this particular puzzle, which had been patiently waiting for the most dramatic moment possible, dropped into place.

_Ku-oniisama._

_Ku._

_Nine._

"They told us," Sakura sucked in a shaky breath, shaking her head a bit faster. "They told us that the Fourth killed the Kyuubi."

"You can't kill us," the turtle said with certainty. "Not really. You can seal us away, and twist us to your will if you have the right techniques." The bitterness returned for that part, somehow alien against his soft, measured words. "You can even cut pieces of us away and kill or destroy our containers. But you can't _kill_ us. Or at the very most, not for long." His tails rose and fell, rose and fell, and he made an obvious effort to calm his agitation and return to his normal politesse. "…my apologies. I had…I had want to ease you into this, but that seems unlikely now."

"Why are you being so polite?" Sakura demanded. If her tone was harsh, it was only because she was trying, with various amounts of success, to deal with this new, frightening information. "I-I don't…you're a _demon._ Aren't you supposed to hate humans?"

"I have, arguably, been given quite enough reason to do so," the turtle acknowledged. "And, were you…of different circumstances…I would, naturally, do whatever I could to oppose you at every turn. However, our Honored Father always said that one should treat women with respect."

"Am…am I the first girl you've been sealed inside, then?" After everything they had said to each other so far, that the diminished demon apparently practiced an archaic version of chivalry seemed far less absurd than it would have been had it come up in some other way or during another time.

He shifted on his belly, his tails rolling up and down, up and down. "No," he admitted. "But the first and previous young lady I was sealed within met her end before I could attempt to make contact with her."

"Just say whatever you're holding back," Sakura advised, feeling strangely tired despite the fact that she was in the middle of sleeping. "We both know I'm probably not going to like it, but what's one more thing on top of it all?"

"Very well," he sighed. "She…ah…met her end _decisively_." His tails went through the nervous tic once more, and Sakura shot him a _look_. It probably only worked because of their dream-skewed proportions, but he continued. "The seal from that particular time was…strange…and I was not able to glean as much information from the outside world as I had with the containers before and after her, but the end was somewhat clearer than the rest. She leapt in front of her teammate's technique." His next bought of uncertainty ended without any more needling from Sakura. "That teammate grew up to be the man who took you from the cave."

"Kakashi-sensei." Her fingers knotted in the stretchy, pink fabric of her swimsuit as she remembered the sense of visceral deja vu she had experienced, seeing him pinning her captor to the wall through his chest. "He was…oh _no_." Her eyes burned and her throat constricted. It was a startlingly vibrant sensation, she thought her real, twelve-year old body might actually be crying.

"Um," said the demon. There was a note of helplessness in his voice, cementing his designation as a member of the male species.

Sakura scrubbed a hand over her face roughly. "Why?" She asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Why did she do it? Why did…why was death better than living with you sealed in her?" Sakura was perceptive enough to have caught that between the lines.

"Ah." His tails stilled. "Well, as I said, the seal was very…different…when it came to my time with her. I was aware of very little, but if I have my time frames correct, it was during a time of war. Perhaps the seal was meant to break and set me loose, bewildered and enraged, upon your homeland." Sakura thought again of Naruto and his alleged condition, but put it out of her mind as it still seemed too fantastic, even amidst everything else. "Perhaps she was aware of what it meant to be a jinchuuriki and found death preferable. I can only give you an educated guess," he apologized again. "I did not know her, or her thoughts. Only the end results, to put it politely."

"What _does_ it mean to be a jinchuuriki?" Sakura asked. Even as the words formed on her lips, she felt her dream-born courage flag and wither. She wasn't sure she _wanted_ to know.

He fell silent. "I could show you." His words were hesitant, further cementing her suspicions that 'nothing good' would be a massive understatement of an answer. "I could…I don't have every detail of their lives stored away. None of their seals were as complex as yours, though the closest would be the one your predecessor had. But the times when their emotions ran high, or they…_used_ me. I could show you that." His tails tapped against the sand. "I…am not sure I should, however."

A stilted silence stretched between them, and for a long moment, the only sound was the hiss of the sea foam against the shoreline. "Do it," Sakura decided. If there was one tool, as both a shinobi and as a girl, that she had never been able to succeed without, it was information. If this was her reality, and not just a supremely twisted and complex dream, then she needed to know what she was in for.

"…very well." The turtle squirmed and shuffled in the sand, using his tails to propel himself towards the water. He seemed to grow with each inch, and by the time Sakura stood and followed him, he was easily twice the size of her bed at home, and she was her actual age once more. "You may take hold or follow at your leisure."

"How big are you normally?" Sakura wanted to know, gingerly curling her fingers over a suitably large bump in his armored shell.

"I suspect," he replied, "that you will have an answer very soon." He swam further out, picking up speed, but paused once the strip of beach disappeared entirely. "…I wonder if the actual ocean is like this." His voice was deeper now, radically so, but there was no mistaking the chord of longing lancing through it.

"You've never been to it before?" Sakura was startled.

"No," sighed the turtle, and if this was reality it would have come as a flood of bubbles rather than something intelligible as he had begun to dive. "I've never managed to get farther than a lake before they found me and bound me once more."

"Oh."

She fell silent at that, unsure as to what, if anything, she could say. After a time, the ocean transitioned to a suffocating, silent darkness, and Sakura could not pretend that this was her dream any longer.

Something eventually glimmered against the blackness, and as they drew closer Sakura tentatively identified it was a bubble, though it looked opaque and sickly.

The demon, now the size of a house and still slowly expanding, gave her an introduction that was unnecessary but wholly welcome. Anything was better than that terrible, oppressive silence. "This is from the life of my first container. Exerpts from all shall, perhaps, serve as an adequate explanation. Are you still certain you wish to do this?"

"Yes," said Sakura, gripping tight to all the courage she usually felt inside of her own head.

His massive head ducked in silent acknowledgement, and with a flick of his tails, they entered.

* * *

.

* * *

"Sakura-chan! Wake up! SAKURA!"

Sakura woke to two hands gripping her shoulders and shaking her roughly. She shoved their owner away and scrambled back—or at least, she tried to do so. Her legs caught in the sleeping bag and her hip pressed painfully into the puzzle box, forcefully rousing her back into awareness.

"Wh…Naruto…?" Her vision was strangely blurred, and when she tugged free her arms and raised her hands to her face he found that her cheeks were totally wet. She wondered, suddenly and still half-addled, if she had actually gone into the ocean. Thankfully, Naruto spoke up before she could say anything embarrassing.

"You…you were crying, Sakura-chan." He rubbed his neck, looking solemn. Sakura didn't like that; it didn't suit him. "Really, really hard. We…I've been trying to wake you up."

She saw Sasuke-kun across the fire, a dark slip of a shadow against a nearby tree. The shifts must have switched at least once, she realized, since the faint light of dawn was only beginning to blur the night sky into the ugly gray of the unbearably early morning.

"O-Oh," she said, trying the even out her hitched breathing. "Thanks." She looked at him, then away, unsure of what she could say, after everything she had just experienced. The tail end of that thought triggered a sudden, desperate need to confirm that she wasn't crazy or delusional.

She struggled out of the sleeping bag and waved off Naruto's look of alarm. "I-I need to step out for a moment." She made a vague gesture, and Naruto thankfully interpreted it as a need to relieve herself, reluctantly hanging back as she stumbled off towards the safe area they had designated for such things.

She leaned against a tree and peered around nervously, before deeming it safe and folding up the hem of her shirt so that her stomach was bare. She fingers trembled a little as they slid into the familiar sign for a Bunshin, and she called forth her chakra. And then two things happened.

First, her chakra rushed up faster and more potent than it ever had before, overloading the jutsu and leading her to produce a limp, cartoonish facsimile of herself.

Second, a dark, complex sigil bloomed across her lower abdomen.

Sakura dismissed the jutsu and tugged down her shirt, then quietly crouched down and buried her face in her hands. Trembling, and haunted by the specters of the monstrous, hateful, despised men whose shoes she was suddenly required to fulfill, she wept.

When the tears stopped, she wiped her face, returned to her spot by the fire, closed her eyes against the heartbreakingly concerned stares of her teammates, and tried desperately to figure out what she was going to do.

* * *

.

* * *

_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,617

_**Total Word Count:**_ 10,748


	4. Attention

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Attention

* * *

.

* * *

"That was some C-Rank," one of the guards at the gate said flippantly as they returned. It was the same pair of chuunin who had seen them off originally. Naruto wanted to explode at him for the poor joke, but he saw that both the man and his partner's eyes were sharp and alert, cataloguing every last nuance of the scene. So he forced up a grin, as wide as he could managed given the circumstances.

"You don't know the half of it." It came out more tired than he'd have liked, normally, and his eyes naturally darted back to Sakura-chan. She had been quiet the entire day, no matter now loud or frivolous or tooth-achingly cheerful he tried to be. She didn't tell him to shut up or hit him—she just smiled wanly and went back to staring at the ground to make sure she didn't step on anything sharp.

Naruto honestly missed the normal, lively, volatile Sakura-chan, but he didn't know how to get her back. Even he hadn't managed to miss the lesson in the Academy focused on dealing with a female teammate after enemy capture that went south; he knew what _not_ to do, not to move towards her suddenly or flank her peripheral, or anything like that. But he didn't know what it was that he—and the bastard, who for once got the raw end of the deal when it came to Sakura-chan, in circumstances that stripped Naruto of any chance of taking pleasure in it—_should_ be doing.

How could he just…bring it up? Should he try to get her to talk about it, or would that make things worse? Should he try to get her mind off of it, or would she think that he didn't think what happened mattered?

He couldn't even take his anger and helplessness out on the assholes who…who _took_ her. From the blood still spattered across Sensei's vest and arms, there was probably nothing left of them at all. Something deep, deep down within him, something small and cold and angry that he tried to think about or associate as part of himself, burned with vindictive pleasure at that.

It was a strange mixture between wrong and right that had trouble Naruto since their team regrouped after the ambush. He felt, intrinsically, that it was wrong of him to feel happy that anybody was dead. On the other hand, one of his precious people had been taken, and hurt in ways he didn't think he could—hoped he would _never_—even begin to fathom. Why _shouldn't_ he be happy that the bastards had paid for what they had done?

"U-Um," Sakura-chan cleared her throat and spoke up for the first time that day, curling in on herself as the pair's attention settled on her. Naruto's hands fisted at his sides. "We…we need to get Kakashi-sensei to the hospital. Is…is there any way you could let the Hokage know we need to speak to him while we're doing that?"

"Of course," said the second guard gently, apparently and correctly divining, from her posture and rather obvious lack of shoes, that she had been caught up directly in whatever had laid out their teacher. "But why don't you leave your client here with us, since he seems to be fine." There was nothing outwardly accusing in the man's tone, but Naruto heard Tazuna gulp loudly.

Naruto did not feel even a speck of sympathy, for once.

"Thank you." Sakura-chan bobbed her head in gratitude and followed Sasuke over the threshold. Naruto and his clones followed suit, Sensei still cradled as carefully as possible in the too-small field stretcher.

As they trundled towards the bustling streets of their home, Naruto looked up at the visages carved into the mountain that he someday wished to join and thought, for the first time, that he just might understand why they always looked so grim. A little bit, at least.

* * *

.

* * *

If Sasuke was more self-absorbed, he might wonder if the current state of his team wasn't some sick, twisted form of karma he had somehow brought down on all of them.

For once, Sakura was keeping her distance. She had made an obvious effort to keep her reactions to him as mild as possible, but she still flinched every time he turned his head in her direction. It was a far cry from the way she would glue herself to him and all but beg for his attention on a normal day.

Just because he didn't _miss_ her smothering affection—much—didn't mean that he couldn't be dissatisfied with how withdrawn and hunted she seemed now. He wasn't a monster; they weren't exactly friends, by any measure, but they had settled into a dynamic that wasn't _too_ annoying.

The solemnity surrounding her seemed to be infecting Naruto too, now, and Sasuke found himself of the highly ironic and hypocritical mindset that his teammates should _cheer up_. Or, at the very least, leave the brooding to the one with the most practice. Sasuke knew that they both had plenty of reason to be quiet and thoughtful and upset; he _did_.

But a small, selfish part of him wanted the explosion of action and anger and cheer and outright rambunctiousness that always tried to suck him in back. The pair of them could be annoying, maddeningly so, and sometimes they just didn't take things seriously enough. But Sasuke had never wanted things to be like _this_. They didn't even have Kakashi conscious enough to ruffle their hair and make airy promises about how things were going to be fine, and then rattle off some spiel about friendship and cooperation and the Will of Fire.

For the first time in years, Sasuke wanted somebody else to take charge and be in control, and it _sickened_ him. But feeling helpless against the closed of and grimly thoughtful attitudes of his companions sickened him even more.

Their trip to the hospital seemed almost unbearable; he couldn't remember the road ever being so low, or filled with people. Curious people, who murmured and whispered and shot the occasional suspicious or dirty glance—at _Naruto_, which made no sense at all—until Sasuke raised his head and glared at them, feeling the smallest bit better as they looked away or hurriedly went back to whatever they were doing before.

He had never been so grateful to see the large, white building when it finally loomed up above them, and channeled that relief into more glaring as they enetered. It got result, when paired with the tall figure slumped in the stretcher, and a nurse soon rushed up to them.

Her expression of cool, business-like determination crumbled into a look of pure frustration as she saw just who, exactly, needed treatment. "_Hatake_. Chakra exhaustion, yes?" She barely waited for Sasuke's brusque nod before pinching the bridge of her nose tiredly. "Oh, _honestly_. If we've told that man once, we've told him a thousand times; he _needs_ to keep better track of how long he uses that eye!"

Sasuke briefly thought of asking the woman about said eye, specifically how, exactly, Kakashi had come by it, but grudgingly decided this wasn't a good time.

The nurse waved over another, older woman who had just emerged from a hallway. "Miho, could you help me with him? I swear, I'm keeping him here to _fully_ heal up this time, even if I have to sedate him."

Miho sighed, but quickly closed the distance and relieved one of Naruto's clones of the end of the stretcher he had been entrusted with. "Yumi-chan, you need to stop taking this sort of thing personally. I do agree that some sedation _might_ be a good idea, at least for a day or two…depending on the damage!" The matronly woman tacked on warningly, catching the glint that appeared in the shorter brunette's eye. She turned to the genin then, her face a picture of gentle, well-practiced concern. "Now, dears, do any of you need any treatment?"

"Sakura-chan does," Naruto threw out as his clones were dismissed, before either of the others could speak up. Sakura looked uncertain, but Sasuke knew that the dead-last was absolutely in the right for once and nodded his agreement.

A third nurse, this one tall and blonde, appeared as if on command from the same hallway as Miho. "I've got a free examination room. I can take her."

"You go with Suzu over there, alright sweetheart?" Miho encouraged, as she and Yumi hoisted up their teacher. "She'll take good care of you."

Sasuke might have pegged her as saccharinely patronizing, but for once a soft touch was the best approach. He wondered, suddenly, if they had known what had happened from a single look. He waved off the strange thought as Sakura trudged down the hall, leaving him and Naruto alone. They were probably just trained on how to deal with timid-seeming patients.

"…this sucks." Naruto sighed gustily and slumped down into one of the many plastic chairs littering the room. Even the spikes in his hair seemed to be drooping.

Sasuke stood silent for a beat longer, before reluctantly taking a seat as well. "…yeah."

The two of them, while not outright at each other's throats these days, were still unused to the tense, stilted détente that recent events had forced them into. They had been walking on eggshells the entire trek back, it seemed, and it was gratifying to know that even the near inexhaustible Naruto was flagging from it.

"Do you think…" Naruto rubbed a hand over his mouth slouching forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "She's gonna…she'll be okay, won't she? I mean…eventually."

"…" Sasuke wished that he hadn't voiced that particular question. It made the helplessness swoop back in.

"She'll—"

"I don't _know,_" Sasuke bit out, frustration bleeding into his voice. "I don't…how can we know? We're not…we don't even know _what_ happened to her." Perhaps, just perhaps, it was childish of him to not want to fully believe the conclusion that they had both arrived at. Even now, he tried not to think about what the medic examining Sakura might write on her clipboard.

For a moment, it looked like Naruto was going to yell, but he deflated soon enough. "I just…I want her to be okay, Sasuke."

It was jarring, hearing his actual name with no insult tagged onto it. Sasuke sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "….yeah. Me too."

After that, they fell into an uneasy silence. There was a clock behind the front desk, and each tick of the second hand seemed unnaturally, obscenely loud as they waited.

Sakura shuffled out some time later and they both stood, each examining her for any sign, any indication of how things had gone. Nurse Suzu had a sympathetic look on her face, which was not exactly the most confidence-inspiring detail, but Sakura herself looked more or less the same as when she left them. The bandages on her feet had been changed, and somebody had tracked down a cheap pair of straw sandals for her to use; there was a small plaster holding a cotton-swab to her bicep, indicating that she had been given some sort of injection. She hadn't been crying recently, at least, which Sasuke decided to take as a tentative positive.

He fought back a shiver, remembering the desperate, broken sobbing that had cut through the dark of the night.

"Now, just…pass this on to the Hokage during your de-briefing," Suzu was saying, a gentle hand on Sakura's shoulder blade as she gave the girl a thin folder. "Whatever you decide to do, he'll need to know."

And there went _any_ positive feelings whatsoever.

Sakura hugged the folder to her chest with one arm, using her free hand to brush a lock of hair behind her ear. It was a motion he had seen her do a thousand times between lessons, and he took the slightest of comforts from the burst of normality. "I will. Thank you."

He could see that Naruto, very badly, wanted to ask about that comment. Sasuke himself wanted to ask. But the both of them merely stood around uncomfortably until Sakura started walking. They were in a sense paralyzed but what they felt was their place, and didn't dare take the chance of stepping out of line only to make things worse for her.

"We should get going," said Sakura, ducking her head so she didn't have to meet their inquisitive looks. The lock of hair fell in front of her face again, but she didn't bother fixing it again. "The Hokage has probably been waiting."

* * *

.

* * *

"It started normally," the girl Naruto and her teachers had lauded as confident said, her voice small. "For most of the trip, we were just making sure Tazuna-san kept up a decent pace. Then…sometime in late afternoon there were these…chains, and…" She faltered visibly, squeezing the medical file. "I-I'm sorry, Hokage-sama. My memories of what exactly happened then are a little…a little blurry."

Hiruzen smiled kindly, inwardly heaving a sigh. It was unfortunate that the medical team had elected to enforce a period of rest for Kakashi given his record of being a less than perfect patient. If the end results were any indication, he would not like the particulars of this particular incident.

"It's quite alright, Sakura-chan," he said, switching his attention instead to the boy left of her. "Sasuke-kun, perhaps you might be able to give me a better idea of what, exactly, happened?"

"We were ambushed," the boy began, his words clipped and precise. "Kakashi…sensei," he added on grudgingly, catching Hiruzen's raised eyebrows. "Was the one they targeted first. The attackers circled him with a pair of shuriken-chain and pulled; we…momentarily believed that they had killed him, but he replaced himself. Around the same time…"

He glanced at Sakura-chan, and Naruto-kun frowned angrily at the floor, and Hiruzen motioned for Sasuke-kun to continue. He was beginning to see the rough shape of things, and he had been right: he did not like the looks of it at all.

"Around the same time, Sakura was…I'm not really sure what technique they used, but she was dragged off somewhere, by another party." He paused again, and Hiruzen thought he saw a flash of self-incrimination pass through his eyes. "Naruto and I stayed to protect the client, but as soon as he noticed that Sakura was missing, Kakashi-sensei confronted the ambushers directly. Naruto sustained slight wounds, one of which was poisoned, but Kakashi-sensei managed to treat it after…eliminating the attackers."

There was a definite note of confusion there in regards to Naruto's condition and Sakura-chan shot the still-silent blond a concerned, surprised glance, but Hiruzen motioned for Sasuke-kun to keep going.

It was Naruto who started talking, however, and the angry frown had melted into a look of haunted confusion. "Sensei…Sensei got really upset when he saw the forehead protectors on the ambushers. He had them bound and asked them what they had done with Sakura-chan and…and they didn't know. So he killed one, and then asked again…" He shook his head, glancing back at the floor. "They…apparently they were brothers. But they really didn't know who had taken Sakura-chan or why, or where." He licked his lips. "So…so he killed the other one."

After it became apparent that Naruto wouldn't—or, perhaps, couldn't—go on, Sasuke-kun took up the tale once more. "They were rogue shinobi from Kirigakure, but they didn't strike through the symbol—"

"The others did," Sakura-chan chipped in. "I-I saw…at the end, they were wearing them, and the emblem was scratched out on the ones I could see."

She fell silent again, looking at the floor, and Hiruzen wished desperately for his pipe. Trust the befuddling nuances of the Bloody Mist's political state to muck up a relatively routine escort mission.

"…well, after he had finished with the two who ambushed us, he interrogated the bridge-builder about who else might be after him and why, and apparently the state of Wave is far worse than he told us. There's a wealthy shipping magnate who basically owns them, and apparently he's not shy about hiring mercenaries." He wrinkled his nose in distaste, but quickly slipped back into his normal mask of solemnity. "After that…Kakashi-sensei gave us orders to watch the bridge-builders, and instructions on what to do if he couldn't find Sakura within a decent timeframe. And then he left to hunt them down."

"He looked so _angry_," was Naruto's input, followed by a faint shudder. Hiruzen couldn't blame him, considering Kakashi's deep-rooted issues with losing comrades during the course of a mission. "After that, we…we stayed put. There wasn't much we could do with the bodies, so we left them where Sensei had put them. And about five hours later, he came back with Sakura-chan."

"I see," said Hiruzen, noting the way the girl in question hunched in on herself as the attention settled firmly on her. Noting the worry and uncertainty she was broadcasting, he made an important decision. "Naruto-kun, Sasuke-kun, would you be so kind as to allow Sakura-chan and I some privacy for this next part?"

Both boys looked as though no, they most certainly _would not_ be so kind, before a few tentative looks at their teammate convinced them to grudgingly step out.

"Now then," said Hiruzen, extending a hand. "Would I be right in assuming that what you've got there is for me, Sakura-chan?"

She nodded, stepping forward to hand him the folder. He inspected its contents, and felt a bit of his initial worries settle, as new ones rose to take their place. The only physical issues had been slight bruising on her wrists, and the scrapes and blisters being more or less barefoot for travel had left. She had gotten several simple injections to nip anything she might have caught from the dirt roads, but the most alarming note was in regards to her chakra system—it was in a total, agitated upheaval.

"Have you been having any difficulties molding your chakra?" He had to ask, simply to hear it from the girl herself. It had been marked, along with analytical and academic skills, as one of her strengths by her Academy teachers.

"…yes," Sakura-chan agreed, now visibly miserable without either of the boys there to play audience. "They…I haven't been able to use jutsu properly since…since the cave."

"So, your captors took you to a cave. Could you tell me what happened then, Sakura-chan?" Hiruzen decided it would be best to ease her along.

"They…" She paused, considering her words carefully. "I-I don't know _exactly_ what they did. They didn't ask me anything, didn't even _talk_ to me between when they took me and when…when Kakashi-sensei killed them. But what they did…it…in my head…" She bit her lip and dropped her arms to her sides helplessly. "They didn't…I know they didn't…do what the boys think. They _didn't_."

"Sakura-chan." He waited patiently until she looked up and met his gaze. "You're aware of what chakra is, I'll wager?" She nodded, and he gave her as sympathetic a look as he could manage. "Occasionally, when a shinobi is trapped within a particularly strong genjutsu and unable to break it, it may…negatively impact the mental and emotional aspects of the victim's spiritual energies." He chuckled slightly as her eyebrows drew together in confusion. "Yes, they don't teach the more intricate technical aspects in the Academy. The spiritual portion of your chakra is built through exercise and experience, as you know, but your mental and emotional states are heavily involved in how your chakra flows, and how well you can shape it."

Understanding bloomed in her eyes, and sadness tinged his smile when his point registered.

"It generally isn't a common result these days," largely due to the lack of war, matured Uchiha clan members, and so on. "But the fact of the matter is, depending on just how lasting the trauma, the victim can lose control of their ability to regulate their chakra indefinitely. Perhaps not forever," he allowed. "But we may have to remove you from active duty for some time, Sakura-chan."

The girl's eyes flooded with tears, and even after all these years Hiruzen felt his heart twist at the sight of a young girl crying.

"There is counseling available," he hastened to tell her, but she shook her head quickly.

She raised a hand, and at first he thought it was in order to wipe her face; but she kept moving, fumbling with the knot at the nape of her neck until her forehead protector came loose and dangled in her hand. "I can't." Her voice came out as a scratchy whisper. "I _can't_—after…after what they did in the cave…" She blew out a gusty sigh that was half a sob. "Hokage-sama, I'm sorry, but I _can't be a shinobi_ anymore. I can't."

Hiruzen was quiet for a long moment, silently dealing with the disappointment that rose up within him. Haruno Sakura would hardly be the first kunoichi to resign after a brush with the grittier aspects of what would be expected of her more and more as she continued with her career, but it was never enjoyable watching one of the budding talents that made it to genin withering away, unrealized.

"I understand, Sakura-chan," he said gently. "I'll prepare the proper paperwork once we're finished here, if you're certain."

"I am," she said quietly. Her voice was choked with emotion, none of it positive, but her eyes glinted with dismal, unhappy resolve.

Hiruzen sighed, privately wondering how, if at all possible, he could break the news to Kakashi during _his_ future debriefing without the copy-nin adding it to the long list of things he blamed himself for. "Very well. Now, if you're at all able, I'd like some details about the men who captured you…"

* * *

.

* * *

Naruto had been pacing a hole in the carpet the entire time outside of the old man's office as they waited for Sakura-chan to finish. He didn't like the idea of leaving her on her own right now, even with the Hokage. She seemed fragile now, as though being nudged the wrong way would leave her a shattered, crying mess.

His worries seemed _entirely_ well founded when the large door finally opened and she stepped out, her face flushed and her cheeks, once again, sporting some telltale tear tracks.

"He, um," she cleared her throat roughly and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. Naruto might have wondered why they were in her face in the first place, if the tears hadn't taken up the lion's share of his concern. "Hokage-sama wants to talk about more details with you two."

Sasuke pushed off from the wall he had been leaning against and approached warily as Naruto silently floundered over what to say to the girl he loved. They were both surprised, however, when Sakura visibly hesitated, bit her lip, and suddenly wrapped her arms around each of their necks.

The impromptu hug was a bit too tight, and she seemed to be trembling. She let go before either of them—mostly Naruto—could even _think_ about returning the gesture. She coughed, stepped back, and smiled wanly at them. "I'm…I think I'm just going to head home now." She moved past them, and Naruto was struck by the urge to grab her, or ask her to wait—but the old man called for them to come back in, and she disappeared down the hall.

He told himself that they could catch up at training once Sensei was up and about and that her family would probably be more help when it came to…coping. And then he and Sasuke entered the room again, and he felt the other boy go stiff as a board beside him.

He turned, curious as to what could actually make Sasuke seize up, and followed his dark, wide-eyed gaze to the forehead protector that had most certainly _not_ been neatly folded up on the old man's desk the last time they saw it.

For a few seconds, Naruto's brain absolutely refused to register what it meant. However, the significance was hammered in when the Hokage, the man who took him out for ramen, one of the few who knew who he was, what he was, and loved him just the same, who was the closest thing besides Iruka-sensei that he had to family, looked up at them sadly.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It was her decision."

* * *

.

* * *

_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 4,095

_**Total Word Count:**_ 14,843


	5. Windfall

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Windfall

* * *

.

* * *

Suzu looked up from the paperwork she was filling out as a soft knock sounded against her small cubby-hole of an office. "Come in," she called. "Doors open." She thought it might be Miho, with a cup of coffee as payment for sanctuary from Hatake Kakashi's Number One Anti-Fan, but found herself faced with a much more…colorful individual.

A familiar one, at that, and her short-term memory turned up the unfortunately fitting name quite easily. "Hello again, Haruno-san. What can I help you with?"

The girl shuffled in, looking at the ground the way she had for ninety percent of the examination Suzu had given her. A part of the older woman ached in sympathy. Haruno Sakura looked as fragile and sweet as her name; while there had been no outstanding physical issues apparent in her initial scan, the obvious emotional turmoil and the roiling, choppy flow of what should have been exceptionally smooth and streamlined chakra had cast a grim shadow over the young kunoichi's career. Suzu had double-checked her results with Miho, at first believing them to be a fluke on her part, but the older and more experienced medic's solemn clucking had confirmed the results. Miho had offered several examples she herself had seen, during her early training, and Suzu had dutifully noted them on a spare note sheet that she had slipped at the back of the sheaf of papers in the folder she had handed her patient not an hour ago.

"Um…" Haruno bit her lip, heat rising to her cheeks. Her bangs hung loose and shaggy in front of her eyes, and Suzu tried not to think of what it meant that there was nothing in her hair to hold them back now. "I…I realized that I left something of mine in the examination after my tea…after—the boys and I arrived at the Hokage's office."

"Ah!" Suzu's face brightened a bit, the small mystery that had been nagging at the back of her mind for the better part of the last half an hour. "I think I might know what you mean. Black box with some pretty art on the sides? About so large?" She made an approximation with her hands, and the girl nodded, a faint look of relief putting the tiniest spark back into her.

"Yes, that's it exactly. Could I have it back, please?"

"Sure thing, sweetheart," Suzu said, standing with a subtle, vertebrae-spreading stretch. Ten minutes behind her desk always felt like ten years, and ten hours actively on call seemed to slip by in the span of ten seconds. A quick trip to the Lost and Found would be a welcome break. "Come right with me."

Haruno followed after dutifully, the cheap sandals Suzu had dug out of storage for her slapping softly against the tile every step. They stopped at the front desk, which was currently being manned by a rather bored-looking Hiro the intern, who quickly produced the large plastic receptacle they used for the smaller things left behind by the patients that flitted in and out through the course of the day.

"Here you are," she said, pulling loose the lacquered piece of woodwork and handing it off to its rightful owner. The girl held it loosely, rubbing her thumb over one side before ducking into a grateful bow.

"Thank you very much for your assistance, miss," Haruno murmured.

"Any time," said Suzu, before pausing awkwardly. "Except…you know, maybe not. If you leave classy stuff like that laying around, it might just get snatched up before it can find its way back to you."

"I'll keep that in mind," Haruno promised, thanking her again before turning and leaving.

It wasn't until Suzu had paused for a pit-stop at the coffee machine that she really had time to wonder about why the girl was holding onto such a pretty thing, but lacked a proper bag or even shoes. But there was paperwork to be done, and lab work that would, inevitably, be followed soon after by even _more_ paperwork, so the curious thought slipped between the cracks of her mind and was summarily buried.

* * *

.

* * *

With the puzzle-box safely retrieved—and the knife of guilt twisted deeper, because _that_, hiding the box while she gave her report, _that_ had been deliberate and coordinated as precisely as possible—Sakura quickly slipped into the evening crush of the village streets, letting the tide of humanity ferry her towards the side-lanes and alleyway shortcuts she wanted.

A not insignificant part of her wanted desperately to just rush back to the house with the balconies and flowerboxes and pretty yellow curtains that had been her home for the past decade or so, to wrap herself in a giant cocoon of linen on her bed and stay that way until her parents returned from their current 'business trip'. But a far stronger, more rational part of her brain knew that Naruto knew where she lived, and he would probably drag Sasuke-kun along to grill her about her dramatic exit from the shinobi corps. And their team.

And then Sakura would probably burst into tears _yet again_, and the truth would come out in some great big mess, and all her off-the-cuff, self-preserving plans would be for naught, and then ten, five, maybe even two years down the road she would find herself camped out on a corpse-strewn, mud-soaked battlefield, surveying her handiwork and _relishing it, _the way she would have been trained to, smiling delightedly at each ruptured body the way she might at a particularly complex firework show at a festival.

_Like the others._

And that? That was just _not_ going to happen. So, instead of going back to the empty house filled with the memories of her relatively simple, warm childhood, Sakura set out for Uncle Mochi's shop.

Uncle Mochi, as fate would have it, was neither Sakura's uncle, nor actually named Mochi. Some days, she even sorely doubted he was _actually_ a licensed shopkeeper. He was legally known as Morie Yasuchika, and he had been the—geographically—closest of her father's many, many business partners for as long as she could remember. It said something about all of them, she thought, that when he looked up from where he was negotiating with a client and saw her, bereft of dresses or ribbons or her forehead protector, he simply waved her off to make her way to the set of rooms behind the counter, which she did readily.

And she most certainly did _not_ notice that his client lacked is left pinky, or that what they were haggling over glinted with gold enamel and looked astronomically classier than anything a man that looked like that should own.

Now, never let it be thought, even for a second, that her parents were _criminals_. They certainly weren't. Her father had a penchant for horrible jokes, had a silly beard, and grinned so much that laugh lines were already settling in deep at the corners of his eyes. Her mother was a bit strict sometimes, Sakura's best friend at others, and had turned her back on Sakura's grandfather and his legacy when she was fifteen, cutting all ties with the Ryuugamine Syndicate and never looking back.

So…yes, okay, they _might_ have less than 'honorable' acquaintances, but on the whole Haruno Kizashi and Mebuki were guilty of nothing more than slight adrenaline-dependence, an excellent eye for historically or artistically important objects no matter what their state of decay or disrepair, and perfectly shrewd business sense.

They loved to travel, letting their wanderlust drag them across the map, and it was only for the sake of Sakura's growth and need for stability that they had leased out a house in Konoha as more than just a timeshare.

It was a moot point now, Sakura conceded to herself as she waited in Uncle Mochi's private sitting room, turning the puzzle-box over and over and over again in her hands as she waited. She made sure not to press down or squeeze or slide _anything_ as she did so, still unsure as to just what, exactly, might happen if she accidentally opened up a box that had once had a demon sealed inside of it in a thickly urban area.

Nothing good, of that much she was grimly certain.

Her gloomy introspection was cut short by Uncle Mochi's entrance, a showy affair, all long, fluttery sleeves and veritable clouds of smoke and perfume wafting in with him. "Sakura-chan!" The man cried, clasping her to his chest in his usual over the top manner. "What brings my favorite girl to grace me with her presence? Last I heard, you were heading in order to handle some, ah…_business_, in Wave."

There was…_something_ in his voice, something in the shift of his eyes, something she couldn't muster up the concentration to fully pin down, that made Sakura wonder if she shouldn't be grateful, in a sick sort of way, that her team never got the chance to set foot in Wave. She was too drained to figure out if Uncle Mochi's use of 'some-ah-significant-pause-_business'_ was referring to the sometimes bloody ninja-kind, or the infinitely grubbier and more cutthroat merchant-kind.

"Some things happened," Sakura said, looping her arms as far around his large waist as they could go in return. "And…well, to cut a long story very, _very_ short, I've come to the conclusion that I really am _not_ cut out for the life of a shinobi. And I need to get in touch with Mom and Dad, like, yesterday."

"Hmm," Uncle Mochi hummed, releasing Sakura in order to give her a curious once-over. His eyes fell on the puzzle-box still gently wrapped in one of her hands, and after a moment of intense scrutiny his face lit up. "Oh, _Sakura-chan!_ Could it be? Have you possibly come to your senses and _seen the light?"_

Haruno Kizashi had once told his daughter, when he was a little drunk after a festival and piggy-back carrying her home, that if there was one thing that was universally true, it was that people—all people, from all over—derived an intrinsic happiness from being correct. If she was ever in a difficult situation, he had said, the best thing to do was to metaphorically play dead and let the other person involved fill in the blanks however they liked.

It had become something of a guiding principle for Sakura somewhere between here and the cave, and a part of her felt very, very bad for using the simple, mostly-honest tactic with the old, usually kind man she had previously pledged to serve and honor. Not quite bad enough to avoid using it now, however.

"Something like that," she agreed easily, running her thumb up one smooth edge. "I found this while I was outside the village…and a lot of other stuff happened. But I just really need to track down my dad."

"Oh," sniffed Uncle Mochi, dabbing at his eyes with the hem of one of his sleeves. "Oh, Ki-chan is going to be _so happy_. He's always hoped you might take a little more interest in his line of work, you know."

"I'm sure he'll tell you all about it over drinks in a few weeks," Sakura commented, her mouth curving into a fond smile. "So, if you could give me a hint as to what razed-down estate, or supposedly mythical castle, or once-great but now dilapidated and allegedly worthless temple they had their eye on before leaving, I'd really appreciate it. And, um. A discreet way out of the village would help a lot too."

"Yes," agreed Uncle Mochi, his plump lips pursed knowingly. "If you aren't careful, those utter brutes just might confiscate that lovely little piece before you can get it authenticated. That is, if it's actually crafted by who I think it is, rather than being just an admittedly artful knock-off." There were times, many and often, where Sakura had to wonder about the state of the 'antique' dealer's morals and mental state.

Never aloud, naturally, and right now she was too hung up on something he had said to have one of those moments anyways. "Wait; you know what this is?"

"It's a box, with some sort of complicated shift-lock," Uncle Mochi said with bored wave of his hand. "You could probably use it to hold something rather small you didn't want somebody else to see. Frankly my dear, I don't care about _what_ it is, so much as I do who may have made it. Now, I'm nowhere near your father or even your mother's level, so I can't be sure, but the craftsmanship seems uncannily similar to another piece I once saw years ago. It was a simple alms bowl, made by a priest who is widely appreciated in some circles as one of the greatest artists of all time." He let out a somewhat dreamy sigh. "Oh, you wouldn't _believe_ how much the bowl _went_ for, Sakura-chan…there were so many zeros…"

"Well," said Sakura. She was at a slight loss. "Well. I…wasn't aware. It just…seemed important, when I found it."

"Ahh, _yes._" Oh, she did _not_ like the gleam in his eyes. "Tell me, Sakura-chan, where _did_ you find such a delightful little thing? And might there possibly be more of its ilk in the general vicinity?"

"Um." She coughed slightly, trying to find the right words to properly frame the circumstances. "Well, _before_ you jump to any conclusions, just let me just say—"

"Oh, I see," Uncle Mochi tapped the side of his knows knowingly. "You looted your first corpse, didn't you?"

"UNCLE!" Sakura gasped out, but stopped short when she realized that technically, she _couldn't_ say that he was wrong on that score.

"Oh, don't get your feathers in such a ruffle, my dear, I didn't mean anything _bad_. My entire _business_ operates off of the finders-keepers statute!"

"Could you just…please tell me where Mom and Dad are, Uncle Mochi?" Sakura asked, wanting very little of her attention to be diverted back to corpses of any kind.

"Certainly, my girl, certainly," he agreed, stroking his short goatee. "Somewhere in River Country, I believe."

"…I was hoping for something a _little_ more specific than the country, Uncle," Sakura said. "Like…the nearest town, maybe?"

"Terribly sorry," Uncle Mochi apologized. "But I fear poor Ki-chan didn't have much of a lead to go on this time, which is why he said this trip would probably take longer than his usual fare when he left."

Sakura remembered her father mentioning something along those lines, and it didn't much bolster her mood. "Ugh." She rubbed her eyes tiredly. "Well, that's unfortunate. Looks like I'm going to have to dip into my bank account for some supplies…" Which would be unfortunate, since draining the savings set aside from her missions would _definitely_ attract attention, especially considering she had only just gotten back from a mission and had supposedly sustained trauma from a genjutsu—that had the textbook markings of a sleeper agent, which was why she had come to Uncle Mochi.

If there was anybody who could smuggle her out of the village, it was him.

As if to further confirm her choice—which was, frankly, sorely needed considering that she was running on desperate, paranoid fumes—Uncle Mochi took her free hand in his and patted it gently. "Oh, worry not, my sweet girl. There is actually already an account set up for this kind of thing."

"…my _father_ opened up an account for you to access in case you ever had to sm—help me leave the village in a timely and unhindered manner?" Sakura smoothly corrected herself as the beginnings of a put-out frown tried to tug down the man's cheery countenance.

"No, no," Uncle Mochi laughed airily. "Ki-chan would never think of such a thing and you know it. Mebu-chan did it."

Sakura's lips opened in a silent 'ah' of understanding. That made much more sense. "If it's not too late, do you think you could make arrangements as quickly as possible? I know it's…well, it's short notice, but—"

But she had a very, very limited window of opportunity to leave before any chance of escape was crushed. Sure, right now Kakashi-sen—…_Kakashi_ was out cold, but beyond the time it would take for the sedation to fade, she had no way of knowing when he might wake up; the best she could do was hope that fatigue and chakra exhaustion kept him down for a week and plan as though he might wake up the next morning, coherent and ready to report everything that had happened to Sakura.

She thought of a future filled with whole villages, crushed into a slurried pulp before her, disposed of merely by the whim of the Kage that leashed her, and lamely finished, "…but, I'd really appreciate it."

"Think nothing of it, Sakura-chan," Uncle Mochi said kindly, his eyes crinkling at the corners. For all that his principles might be abnormal, he had always treasured her father's contributions to their industry and Sakura herself by association, since her father was never overly mercenary about his prices when she tagged along to watch the proceedings. "I actually may have just the thing to help, but it's not very comfortable and you must swear to me to treat it as though it were made of glass while using it." He gave her a stern look. "It's going out on a shipping caravan headed for Wind Country tomorrow morning, which means you are borrowing somebody else's property and I shall not _stand_ anybody besmirching the good name of my business. Are we understood, missy?"

"You have my word," Sakura promised eagerly, teetering on the cusp of collapsing into relieved, tearful laughter. She managed to keep hold of herself and her caution, but her grip was precarious at best. The constant feeling of being hunted helped, which was why she realized that it was not one of her own.

"Well!" Uncle Mochi clapped his hands, distracting her from that unpleasant discovery and forcing her to retain her pleasant attitude. "I shall hold you to that, but why don't you and I head up to my apartment and have ourselves a nice dinner? Afterwards, we can draw up a list of what you need and I'll have one of my men run out and get your things sorted. That sounds nice, doesn't it?"

Sakura's stomach rumbled at the thought of something more fulfilling than the field rations the team had broken their fast on earlier in the day before she could get a word out and forced her to nod, pink-cheeked. She paused as she followed him to the door hiding the staircase to his living space above the shop, something occurring to her.

"Is…do you think it would be okay if I used some of the money in the account for something else? I'm going…well, there's something I won't be able to do after I leave tomorrow, and I'd like to at least send some flowers out."

"Add it to the list," Uncle Mochi said generously, holding the door open for her with a little flourish. "I don't see why we can't chalk that up as a necessary expense. Courtesy always counts, after all!"

Sakura smiled at him and nodded again, and mentally blew the metaphorical dust off of the section of her brain that she had stored her memories of flower arrangements and meanings in.

* * *

.

* * *

'Just the thing', as it turned out, was a small, decadently decorated trunk with small seals carved on the inside. It had originally been a valuable heirloom until it had been converted to hide any trace of life within it by a courtier who would, for confidentiality's sake, go unnamed, in order to smuggle his various lovers and mistresses past his wife's spies—some of whom were trained shinobi, Uncle Mochi had told her. The man was a romantic who would not be swayed from his adulterous habit, which meant he was, inevitably, found dead in his bed one day.

The wife, wanting to avoid scandal as much as possible, had sold the trunk to Uncle Mochi for a steal with strict instructions to make it disappear into some collection or another so that the trunk would not tarnish her good name any further than it had already. It would, Uncle Mochi revealed, be going on its way to a researcher set up in Wind Country who intended, as best he could tell, to _strip it down_ so that he could examine the sealwork.

Uncle Mochi had nearly refused to sell it to him, but the offer he was given had been far too good to possibly find elsewhere.

Curled up as she was, in new-old clothes, a wig, and hugging the pack containing her provisions and the few other possessions she would be taking with her, Sakura had plenty of time to reflect on this, and more. As she blinked in the dark and tried to calm her rabbit-fast heartbeat, she took a moment to think disparagingly about just _what_ sort of women the courtier had liked—Sakura, despite her own body-image issues, was not an exceptionally large girl, and she didn't have much wiggle room as it was.

What she _did_ have, however, was plenty of time and strict orders not to move any more than she absolutely had to. At this point, she was either going to be discovered immediately and have the whole ugly truth of the matter tugged out of her in the tender grasp of Konoha's Interrogation department, or things would line up and she would be let out just inside the border to River Country and left to her search.

She wanted to find her parents _before_ they ended up going back to a Konoha that knew what she was and wanted something to tie her to itself; she had been their only lasting commitment to the village, since they were drifters by nature, so convincing them shouldn't be very hard at all.

Thinking about stressful could-be futures in a cramped, dark box filled with hundreds of seals actually reminded her of something that had sparked her ire the previous night, and the flame of her temper grew anew.

So Sakura did her best to ignore the gentle stir and rattle of the cart the trunk was on being eased into motion and tried to calm herself, closing her eyes.

She wasn't sure just how long it took her to get to sleep, or if they had passed the gates or not, but eventually Sakura must have fallen asleep, because she found herself back on the beach.

She was twelve from the start this time, but the demon was once again small and being tormented by another monstrous nightmare down the shoreline. This one was not in the guise of a beach-goer; it was tall and almost cartoonishly spindly, black except for the same strange, twisted swirl of a face, which was orange for some inexplicable reason.

Sakura scooped up a thick, gloppy fistful of sand and walked over, tossing it through the nightmare almost casually before kneeling down to give the turtle a long, deceptively pleasant look.

"So," she said, shaking off her hand until the feeling of wetness and grit fade away along with the dark figure. "We need to talk about you, and your bad habit of trying to manipulate me."

* * *

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* * *

_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,909

_**Total Word Count:**_ 18,752


	6. Dearn

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Dearn

* * *

.

* * *

"I would _never_—" began the turtle, before catching the rather unimpressed look she was giving him and rolling his tails almost sheepishly as he reluctantly switched tactics. "Well…I would not go so far as to deem it 'manipulation'. _Manipulation_ is what I was forced to deal with during my previous containment. At most I have been…nudging, let's say."

A chill rattled up Sakura's spine as one particular set of memories tried to squirm over her minds eye, and her tone grew sharp. "_Stop that._ Whatever you want to call it, just…just quit doing it!" The chill abruptly dispersed. She began to pace, restless and unhappy—mostly with herself. She, of all people, knew better than to just up and trust somebody on only a gentle appearance and polite words. That was _her_ tactic of choice, and a part of her felt indescribably ashamed that she had fallen for it, no matter how confused or vulnerable she had been at the time. "I'm stressed enough dealing with just my _own_ mess of emotions, I _do not_ need yours compounding the problem!"

"I was simply trying to—"

"—protect yourself?" Sakura finished for him, looking back accusingly. She realized, after a brief moment of confusion, that she had shrunken down to a younger age once again. She wondered just what the significance of that might be, but shelved the thought for the moment.

"Protect _both_ of us." The demon corrected, looking up at her with his one visible eye earnestly. "You are…very young, and I…I am not." The little turtle's tails rolled again. "I thought, if left on your own with the confusing, conflicting war between what you wanted and what _we needed_ to do, you might…" He hesitated briefly, before admitting, "…you might…choose wrongly."

"So, you thought sharing some fear and dread and reinforcing the memories I saw would 'nudge' me towards the _right_ choice?" Sakura bit out.

"You overestimate just how much I can do in our…arrangement," said the turtle, a faint note of surprise in his voice. Sakura tried, very hard, not to believe it. Much. "The most I did—the most I _can _do—is amplify what already exists. I have largely kept most of my chakra from mixing from yours, and…well, I did not actually do anything more with those memories than show them to you," he admitted, a note of apology cropping up. Sakura tried not to trust _that_ either. "Though they were admittedly some of the worst and I did hope that they might stick with you and caution you from following in those bloody footsteps . As far as I can see, the end result is entirely positive."

"For you," she grumbled, anger still burning slow in her stomach. "But me? I had to leave my friends behind, cancel the career I've spent about half my life preparing for, am being haunted by the _hours _of horror stories that you shared from your times sealed away before me, put my teammates through unnecessary stress instead of telling them the arguably less horrific truth, and now have to run around a strange new country to track my parents down before they can be used against me—_us_." She paused for breath, and then grudgingly let her curiosity trump her temper for a moment. "How…How come they _didn't_ notice your chakra? I spent most of the examination at the hospital absolutely terrified that the nurse would sense you, or the seal would appear while she was feeling around the organs in my stomach or…whatever that pushing and prodding is supposed to inspect."

"Well, the specific technical aspects of the answer to that lie with the man who sealed me within you," began the demon, still keeping his voice tentative and semi-repentant. Sakura was too interested in what he was saying to care, this time. "Somehow, he managed to seal not only I, but the realm I use as my home within you."

"Your…_what_?" Sakura asked, eyes wide.

"My home," he repeated patiently. "I _am_ considered a turtle, after all. Have the times changed so much that people no longer say they carry their homes with them?"

"Well, yeah, they say that," she admitted. "But that's usually meant to wrongly refer to their _shell_, not _pocket dimensions_."

"Hm." The turtle blinked his eye. "Well, I suppose one is never too old to learn new things. Whatever the case, think of it as though a large, massive portion of myself was still within the puzzle-box, and the puzzle-box was also sealed within you. I simply kept as much of myself and my chakra—a largely interchangeable concept, but that is, perhaps, a discussion for another day—within my home. They did not discover me, because there was not nearly enough of me readily present to _be_ discovered. Certainly not enough to trigger any inklings of you carrying a being similar to Ku-oniisama, at least."

"But enough to knock my chakra control off balance?" Sakura asked dryly, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her head ached a little from trying to imagine his example, but she grudgingly supposed it made sense. A very crazy, purely theoretical sense that she didn't fully understand, but it would do for the moment. She paused, a stray thought striking her. "Wait, is _that_ why Naruto could never make a normal clone to save his life in class?"

"I could not say," the turtle seemed to shrug, as best as he could with his anatomy. "My honored brothers and I were once a single entity long ago, which is why I know when one of them is nearby, but we lack any sort of psychic link and I am entirely ignorant as to just what manner of seal he is locked away behind. His strength is radically larger than mine, though, so I would not deem it an unlikely side-effect."

"…I wish I could just talk with him about it," Sakura said quietly. It was meant to be a thought, but keeping that quiet in her own _head_ was difficult. "He's…he's different from the ones you showed me. Maybe _Konoha_ would have been different."

The turtle sat up in clear alarm. "If you intend to change course—"

"I _don't_." Sakura's tired words brought him up short. "All of your nudgy-meddling aside, I'd…I'd probably have run anyways." The words were sour in her mouth, but she continued. "I'm not…I don't think I was ever meant to be on frontlines, no matter how smart I am. I can—_could_ feel myself slipping behind Naruto and Sasuke-kun, every training session—and we still haven't even learned any jutsu from Kakashi-sensei yet. And then…and then, the cave…" Her arms slackened, and then she hugged herself tightly. "I can't—I saw Kakashi-sensei, pulling loose from that body and I…I thought, _'I don't want to do that.'_ I thought, _'I don't want to be a person who __**does**__ that.'_" She shrugged a little. "And either way, the point where I could change my mind about this came and went last night. I'm committed now, even if I'm not _happy_ about it."

"You certainly don't seem to be," he agreed cautiously.

And just like that, her temper flared back up. "Of _course_ I'm not! I've spent the past few days under incredible, ridiculous circumstances, and getting _nudged_ while I'm scared and scrambling for some sort of plan is the last thing I could have needed!" She threw her hands up. "I _told_ you, I _hate_ bullies!"

"I'm not—!" The turtle grew slightly, as though swelling with offense. "I am _not_ a bully! I have…I have done my best to be civil, in the hopes of a better future! I have tried to be courteous, to be helpful, to not unduly pressure you—but I _cannot_ put my faith in the good intentions of the Senju and Uchiha-made _cesspit_ that clapped my honored brothers and I in the shackles of this—this—this _**enslavement**_ in the first place!"

"What?" Sakura drew back slightly. The turtle was now nearly on eye-level with her, and still growing. "They…what?"

"They sold us." The turtle said, bitterness deepening his voice even further with his enlarged form. "Did they ever teach you that, as a child? They caged us, and _sold_ us. They were not the first to solve the problem of a roaming demon with containment, no, not them; but they _profited_ off us, spread us around between your villages and…and even used us as weapons against one another in _your_ wars!"

"I…I-I didn't…know that," Sakura said, her voice weak. Some of her fear—or her fairly pronounced flinch—must have breached the demon's ire, because he seemed to look down at her for a moment before all but deflating with obvious exertion.

"I…apologize," he said, once he was about the size of a coffee table. "It was not my intent—I…" He shuffled against the sand a bit, tails curling in what seemed to be contriteness. "I never _intended_ to manipulate you, as I intimately know the pain of that. But…I suppose, in my own fear, I did not trust you. I have yet to meet a second human I _could_ trust, after our Honorable Father left this world." After a long, long pause, he said again, "I…apologize."

"Just…just don't do it again," Sakura asked, trying and failing to force up a smile. It was hard to paste up a mask of politeness inside of her own head, especially when she could still feel him trying to bury his smoldering, suffocating anger once more. "Please. I mean…if we actually make it out of Konoha, until I find my parents you're going to be the only other person I can rely on and…" She took a deep breath, and finally, fully faced a rather daunting fact she had been avoiding thinking about. "And you're going to be with me for the rest of my life, however I end up spending it. I don't know if we'll ever be able to call ourselves friends, but at the very least I don't want us to be at odds with each other for decades on end."

"…my Honored Father once passed on the wisdom that in an optimal partnership, one treats the other as they themselves would choose to be treated during a disagreement between Shu-oniisama and Ku-oniisama," said the demon slowly. "I will…endeavor to keep it in mind."

"It's a starting point," she agreed, and a somewhat awkward semi-silence rose up to fill the vacuum left by their respective flares of ill temperament. The hiss and spray of the sea provided a calming white noise, and helped her gather up the composure she needed to extend a tentative olive branch. "So…you said 'Shu'-niisama just now. Does that mean you all have—?" She cut herself off, realizing too late just how rudely the question was phrased.

"Actual names, instead of simple designations based on our tails?" The turtle finished for her, waggling said tails for show. Thankfully, his voice was wry instead of offended. "Yes, our Honored Father bestowed them upon us in much the same fashion as _normal_ children." He let her stew for a moment, obviously floundering over her uncertainty of how appropriate it would be for her to ask the next question on her tongue, before slowly inclining his head in a caricature of an introductory bow. "My name is Isobu, though you would be the first in many a year to actually use it to my face."

"I'm Haruno Sakura," she said in turn, though there was almost no way for him to _not _be aware of it after all the different people she had been addressed by since the sealing. Courtesy counted, after all. "I'm afraid you're going to be stuck with me for a while, but I hope we can make the most of it."

"Agreed," said Isobu, and Sakura finally managed to smile again. It was small, and tremulous, but it was progress.

* * *

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* * *

Takeshi had been working for Uncle Mochi more or less since he was about eight years old. He was fast closing in on thirty-one, now, and was fiercely loyal to the eccentric, portly purveyor of goods. The man had never steered him wrong or set him up, despite the obvious expendability of his particular breed of guttersnipe. Takeshi always knew exactly where he stood with Uncle Mochi, which was more than he could say for some of his drinking buddies that were glorified errand boys or bouncers for gangs and whorehouses.

They moaned and groaned about their bosses, but Takeshi knew that the various pay-cuts and reprisals they received every so often were entirely earned; they asked questions where they shouldn't, or touched somebody else's things or women and paid for it. But Takeshi, unlike them, was patently loyal and followed his orders to the letter. A bit slow on the uptake sometimes, perhaps, but he took a quiet sort of pride in being relied upon by a successful man like Uncle Mochi despite that, and refused to do anything to jeopardize that reliance.

So, when Uncle Mochi suddenly assigned him to accompany a delivery caravan when he wasn't supposed to be doing much at all, Takeshi did not question it. He accepted his orders, and carefully inscribed just when and where he was meant to open up the gaudy trunk Uncle Mochi was finally getting rid of, and never even thought of wondering why, or what might be in it. He had his orders, so he went to bed early and joined the caravan when he had been told to the next morning.

The trunk was already loaded up and secured in the second and last covered cart of the make-shift train, and the driver—a man named Dai, who was almost as unquestionably loyal as Takeshi himself—had his team harnessed up and ready to go. He hoisted himself up beside Dai, and with a flick of the reins they were on their way, trundling down the quiet, scarcely populated morning streets.

For once, there wasn't a line at the civilian checkpoint to leave the village, but then again, Takeshi was used to accompanying nearby deliveries, rather than ones that would cross multiple countries, so perhaps just after dawn was exactly when they needed to leave in order to make good time. Takeshi wasn't much of a thinker, so he just slouched back and let Dai do the talking with the shinobi assigned to inspect their caravan.

"Morning Dai," greeted the ninja, with no little familiarity. "Looks like your load's a bit larger than usual."

"Mhm," agreed Dai, calm and cool as ever. He was a nondescript man, and looked even less remarkable beside the much larger and more muscled Takeshi. "There are a few buyers in River, and Wind, and even a few up in Stone, so the boss had me take a little extra muscle."

"You could just hire some chuunin, you know?" The ninja promoted, accepting an itemized list of what they would be taking along with them and beginning to look through the carts to verify it. "Might save you some trouble."

"Uncle Mochi doesn't like to contract out for security," Dai shrugged, waiting patiently for the inspection to conclude.

If Takeshi was a less simple man, and if he had any inkling at all of just what was nestled in the middle of their load, he might have tensed up or shown some sign of worry when the shinobi started on the second cart. He _was_ simple, however, and the trunk was already paid for, so it was something he shouldn't be concerned about outside of the brief window of time Uncle Mochi had told him to open it. So he wasn't.

The ninja eventually finished and stamped both the list and their travel papers, and then Dai flicked the reins again and they rattled off down the road, the village slowly shrinking behind them and the shinobi going back to his post to await the next outward-bound traveller.

Their journey through Fire Country was largely uneventful, aside from the brief detour they took in order to stop by a small town for lunch. They approached the border between Fire and River just as the sun seemed to be beginning to get ready to set, and waited patiently as the customs representatives carefully looked over their lists and let a team of large, lean dogs sniff over each cart, before getting a second round of stamps on their papers with a different shade of red ink and being sent on their way, with helpful directions to a nice little town not far off if they needed to restock any supplies.

They didn't, as it happened, and kept travelling for a few more miles and hours, until it was getting too dim to continue on. Dai halted his horses and set blocks around each of the cart wheels before starting to set up their camp for the evening.

Takashi eased himself down and went around to the end-cart, rolling out a thick woolen blanket on the ground nearby and unloading the trunk as gingerly as possible. Then, as Dai concentrated on tracking down decent firewood, he gently took the key he had been instructed to guard until the trunk was with the man who purchased it and unlocked the richly gilded knot of metalwork at the front of the trunk.

When he eased up the lid, still as careful and mindful of his strength as he could be, Takeshi was slightly surprised to find himself looking at a girl. A pretty one at that, with pale skin and long, glossy black hair, curled up and peacefully asleep. He was fairly certain that Uncle Mochi did not sell people, so it made sense that he had wanted Takeshi to separate her from the trunk before it was passed off to the collector.

Feeling rather proud of his impressive grasp of his employer's thoughts, Takeshi slowly reached down and prodded the young lady's shoulder. Her eyes snapped open, but it seemed to take a moment for her to focus on him. He waited patiently for her to sit up, and then offered her his hand.

"Thank you," began the girl, her soft voice a little hoarse from, presumably, her long nap. She was hugging a pack to her front with one arm, so Takeshi took the liberty of bodily scooping her up and depositing her on the ground outside to minimize any chance of damaging the trunk. He then lowered the lid and relocked it, largely ignoring the girl until he had replaced it on the cart and finished his assigned task.

"You're welcome," he said belatedly, nodding at her. "D'you need any help with directions?" It was, he knew, only polite to help a lady find her way—and this was definitely a lady, even if her clothes were a little worn and faded from use and age. She was a pretty little thing, and besides; Uncle Mochi was always a stickler for manners.

"Yes please," said the little miss, and then she dug out a map from her pack and a small, thick pencil. Takeshi took it. He wasn't a genius when it came to many things, but he had a decent sense of direction compared to most and was able to mark down a rough estimation of where they were currently.

"Thank you," she said again, brushing a lock of ebony hair behind her shoulder and looking up at Takeshi, all pretty green eyes and smiles. "And please thank Uncle Mochi, too, when you get back."

Takeshi nodded, liking the girl, and silently wished her a safe trip, wherever she was headed. It was always nice to meet other people who properly appreciated Uncle Mochi. The girl left soon after, melting into the forest, and Dai emerged from the opposite treeline with an armful of suitably dry sticks.

Takeshi moved to help his partner, pushing the girl from his thoughts but holding on to the warm, precious feeling that he always got after fulfilling his orders perfectly.

* * *

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* * *

_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,352

_**Total Word Count:**_ 22,104


	7. Laconic

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Laconic

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* * *

Kakashi woke from a nightmare—but no, it was worse than a nightmare, because even before he opened his eye, even before he inhaled the familiar, sterile air of the hospital through a mouth bitterly coated with the taste of exhaustion and medically-induced unconsciousness, Kakashi knew without a doubt that the nightmare was real.

There was no way, _no way_ that he could ever forget that vile, cloying chakra that had bubbled up to protectively coat his student when she flinched away from him. He would know it for the rest of his life—there was no way, no amount of booze or missions or therapy that could dull the memory of Rin leaping in front of him. Of the way his arm slipped through and then out of her chest. Of the way that _damned chakra_ oozed up through the hole and made a half-hearted attempt to heal the damage before dissipating along with the light in her eyes.

No, Kakashi knew the feel of the Sanbi's chakra and would until his dying day. And the chakra had had come from _Sakura_. That, more than anything, had made the blow come all the harder. Sakura was—Sakura was _soft_, innocent in a way that had been taken from Rin—from all of them—the moment war broke out. Sakura was the gentle ray of normalcy on a team full of broken, lonely boys. Kakashi had always shied away from her instinctively, and it wasn't until he was carrying her back to where he had left their teammates and client that Kakashi fully understood why.

He had, on some level, wanted to avoid tainting her; he had wanted, desperately, to preserve the bright innocence that he and Sasuke and even Naruto had already lost.

And he had _failed_. Just like he always did, for all he espoused taking care of one's teammates. He hadn't abandoned her but no matter what she thought, he _certainly_ hadn't managed to save her.

That last, self-recriminating jab jogged his brain into full awareness and he quickly sat up, wincing at the way his head spun but largely ignoring it. There was a glass of water on the little table near his cot, which he quickly downed before beginning to tear off the various wires and needles that had kept track of him during his enforced period of rest.

He had swung himself out of bed and was almost finished dressing when the door slammed open, courtesy of the pretty but merciless nag who always insisted on keeping him in bed far longer than necessary. And, like two anxious shadows, Sasuke and Naruto appeared, hot on her heels.

"Hatake—" The nurse began, a truly stormy scowl forming at his blatant disregard for hospital discharge protocol. Naruto, bless his obnoxious little heart, quickly interrupted her.

"SENSEI!" He rocketed into the room, a desperate sort of relief on his face. Sasuke followed suit, a shade of the same on _his_ face, and Kakashi felt his anxiety skyrocket. Given the rather obvious lack of pink, he thought he had plenty of reason to be apprehensive, but cautiously hoped for the best. "Sensei, you've gotta do something! We can't find Sakura-chan!"

The hope did not last, naturally.

"What?" His voice was hoarse, making the demand come out even harsher. His mind raced—Sakura had no reason to know about jinchuuriki and certainly hadn't the last time he had seen her. So she couldn't have taken the same path as Rin. She _couldn't_ have. "Naruto, what do you mean? Did she make it back to the village?"

"She did," Sasuke insisted, his hands fisted in his pockets and his expression black. "We even made sure she…she was examined by a medic, like you told us."

Well, that wasn't _exactly_ the kind of 'help' he had wanted them to make sure she received, but it was definitely a step in the right direction. The seal was still new; surely, the medic had detected it and alerted the pertinent people.

"It's been_ four days_ since we got back," Naruto butted in, clearly distraught. "And…And Sensei, we haven't seen her since the first one when she—when—when she…" He seemed to be fighting the words viciously.

"…she resigned." Sasuke finished, clearly uncomfortable with finishing the sentence.

"She _what_." Kakashi felt a strange sort of numbness come over him, and then he lost a bit of time. One moment he was standing, braced on the bedside table, and the next he was perched on the windowsill and leaping out, deaf to Naruto's cry of alarm and the incensed yelp of the nurse. He darted across the rooftops like a man possessed, straining his still-recovering chakra reserves as much as he dared.

He made it to the Hokage's Tower in record time, but the tense, desperate air surrounding him forestalled any quip that Sarutobi might have otherwise have made when the younger shinobi barged in through the window.

"Leave us," he ordered the young boy Kakashi recognized as Asuma's nephew and a man in dark glasses he assumed to be the child's tutor. The man carted Konohamaru away, the boy complaining all the while, but Kakashi paid them no mind. Almost as soon as the large door closed behind them and the security seals flared to life, he found words spilling out.

"What did the boys mean, _she resigned?"_ It came out aggressive, but Kakashi was teetering on a brink, facing an abyss of old regrets born anew. He didn't have the capacity for patience right now.

His superior sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose and producing a pipe. "Kakashi-kun, her entire chakra system was in disarray from the aftermath of whatever genjutsu was cast upon her; I accepted the resignation, but I gave her the form with the sub-clause regarding full reinstatement after a probationary period. After that sort of damage has been inflicted, it's best not to cage the victim in or take decisions made in a moment of passion as set in stone. I intended to give her a few days to settle, from the ordeal before bringing in a Yamanaka to full assess the damage or any chance of subversion."

Kakashi wanted to laugh. Or yell, or possibly cry. "There's one problem with that," he said, trying and failing to keep his voice even. The Hokage began frowning, his proverbial hackles rising at the uncharacteristic show of emotion. "Sakura _wasn't_ put under a genjutsu."

"What…?" The Hokage frowned, visibly wracking his brain for any alternative. Kakashi didn't blame him for not coming up with it immediately; Kakashi wouldn't have believed it himself, without witnessing that damned chakra. He supposed the seal must have been much more advanced than Rin's had been, if her condition hadn't been readily apparent.

"I have two of a kind on my team now," he said, mirthless. It was too dangerous to blatantly disclose Sakura's condition, even in the Hokage's own office.

He could actually see the moment when things clicked into place for Sarutobi, because he paled beneath his tan and seemed to age a decade. He pressed a withered palm to his face, his pipe abandoned across his desk. "No," he murmured, more to himself than Kakashi. "Heavens, please, no." After a moment he lifted his head, resigned. "I'll send out a team to retrieve her," he said, his expression firming.

"The boys haven't seen her since you did," Kakashi said, wishing he could take vindictive pleasure in the curse that flew from the old man's mouth. All he felt was cold worry, though. A missing girl was worrying—a missing, newly sealed jinchuuriki could be cause for a state of emergency.

He squeezed his hand into a fist as the Hokage summoned down one of his ANBU guards to get a team assembled, and prayed that they weren't too late.

* * *

.

* * *

Ino was having a strange day. A strange, unpleasant few days, actually, and it was all Forehead's fault.

Well, mostly. Ino felt better blaming her than Sasuke-kun, who was the original heart of the issue. She had originally been over the moon that he had returned from his mission early, giving her a window to close the distance between them. Forehead had plenty of opportunities to make her move, so Ino had to take whatever chance she could get.

Infuriatingly enough, however, all Sasuke-kun seemed to want to talk about was her rival in love. He and Naruto—who had been, in a bizarre twist, all but attached at the hip since their return—kept asking her things like where Forehead liked to spend her time, and any relatives she might have in the village. Then they blew her off entirely after getting their information—the absolute nerve of them!

Still, Ino had been unsettled enough by the brief interrogation that she had stopped by the other girl's house. It had been dark and locked up tight, and a quick trip to one of the next-door neighbors had left her with the knowledge that Forehead's parents were out again on one of their many trips.

Perhaps, Ino had concluded, Forehead had decided to stay with a family friend or something until they returned and forgot to let her teammates know. It was unlike her, but a mission that ended so early was sure to have a less than pleasant story behind it. She probably had her reasons.

It would be wrong to say that Ino put the matter behind her after that; it nagged at her viciously, but she was too stubborn to lopwer herself to running around the village to find the other girl. Forehead would probably laugh at her for the effort, Ino tried to tell herself.

Her current situation, however, seemed to shatter any chance of that scenario. "I really haven't heard anything from her, lately," she told the dark, imposing shinobi in the monkey-styled mask that had stopped her on her way back home from lunch with her father. "I-I mean…I've talked to Naruto and Sasuke-kun, and I told them about some places she goes to shop and eat sometimes, but I haven't seen her."

"Please repeat the information."

Feeling sicker by the minute, Ino did so. Her mind raced, even as her father squeezed her shoulder for support. Sakura was many, many things, not all of them words Ino would utter in polite company, but she wasn't difficult to track down, normally. She had _pink hair_, for goodness's sake.

"Thank you," the ANBU said, their voice bland. "Please step forward with any other information you may come across or think of."

"I will," she heard herself murmur, her mind still busy knotting itself up with grim possibilities. When she looked up again, the man or woman that had been questioning her was gone.

"I'm sure they'll find her soon," her father said with an encouraging smile as they began walking again. The words were meant to be reassuring, but Ino thought they both knew that she was in no state to appreciate them.

They fell into an uneasy silence for the rest of the walk. Ino's history with Sakura was short but complex, full of all the drama two preteen girls could manage to pack into a single friendship. That didn't mean, however, that Ino ever wanted her _gone_ gone. Out of her way with Sasuke-kun, certainly, but not _gone_.

When they reached their shop, Ino sped up, intent on making a beeline for her room so that she could flop down on her bed and think about any place Forehead might have gone beyond what she had told the boys and the ANBU.

Her mother stopped her, brushing back a loose strand of hair that fell from her bun. "Oh, Ino—some flowers were delivered for you while you were out. I left them in your room; you know where the vases are." She smiled, teasing note creeping into her voice. "If you find out who the admirer is, though, you might want to give him a lesson on flower messages."

Ino blinked, then rushed up the stairs. Perhaps, she thought giddily, Sasuke-kun had wanted to apologize for his abrupt behavior—and for not giving her the details on the Forehead situation. She bounded into her room, and eagerly snatched up the bundle of flowers laid out on her pillow.

She frowned as she inspected it, her excitement ebbing away as she took in the eclectic mix of flora that had been sent to her. It wasn't a normal arrangement, which flower shops normally had on hand for the inexperienced buyer, and the colors of the flowers were a strange mix of everything. Bluebells, sweet peas, white anemones and chrysanthemums and a flagrant red spider lily at the center, of all things.

It was that last one that made her remember her mother's words from a moment before, and Ino set about puzzling the intent behind the bouquet. Bluebells were meant to express gratitude. Sweet pea was for goodbye, which caused the first spark of uneasiness to emerge. White anemone was for sincerity, and white chrysanthemum was used for truth or grief, which made it a good sell for funerals. Ino was liking it in this context less and less by the second.

The red spider lily, she remembered with a sick jolt, was used to signify either abandonment, or that the giver would never meet the recipient again.

She tried to deny the conclusion her mind was coming to—_I'm sincerely sorry, but I will never see you again, goodbye_—before she became aware of the fact that her grip on the bouquet was crushing more than just the stalks. She loosened one hand and stopped breathing.

The flowers were tied together with a cheap, red ribbon—and tucked neatly into the knot of the bow was a single stalk of cosmos. It was as good as a card, to Ino.

She threw the flowers down on her bed as though they burned, turning tail and flying down the stairs, panic coursing through her veins.

"_DAD!"_

* * *

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_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 2,342

_**Total Word Count:**_ 24,446

_Note: The flower language used in this chapter is Hanakotoba, not the more common Western flower language._


	8. Skill

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Skill

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* * *

Takeshi didn't so much as grunt as he lifted down the chest from the markedly less cluttered cart. A few beads of sweat ran down his baked neck, courtesy of Wind Country's sun at its worst; the trunk hadn't been very heavy even before he took out the girl, so now it was mere child's play to hoist it onto his broad shoulder and carry it into the lavish living quarters of its intended recipient.

The client was a tall man, though certainly not taller than Takeshi and of a much thinner girth, swathed in the many layers of fabric that supposedly kept folks cool in these parts. Takeshi had thought that Dai had been pulling his leg when the driver had told him so before, but apparently he had been telling the truth. The man kept his face covered as well, but Takeshi didn't pay any mind to that; in the past, he had made deliveries to men in all manners of obscuring hats and jackets and cloaks. Far more rare was the client that _didn't_ hide his face. Those types always set Takeshi's teeth on edge for some reason.

"Receipt, please," Takeshi recited, extending his free hand mechanically. The man chuckled, light and airy and somehow disturbing, and produced the relevant slip of paper. Takeshi brought it close to his face, squinting his eyes and studying it intensely before nodding and setting down the trunk, as gentle as he always was with the merchandise. "Final payment, please."

"So methodical," The client purred. Takeshi was not a clever man, or a superstitious one, but something about this strange, slender man's voice was utterly unsettling. Takeshi settled for a short, honest nod, which earned an eerie chuckle. "How refreshing. Here you are." He produced a pouch that clinked together in a familiar manner, and waited patiently for Takeshi to count the gleaming gold coins.

"Uncle Mochi thanks you for your purchase," Takeshi said reflexively once the numbers matched up, and then he carefully lifted the chain holding the trunk's key from around his neck. He waited for the client to take it, unlock the trunk, and inspect the insides, fighting the urge to squirm against the pleased aura oozing around the strange man all the while. Eventually the slim man straightened, and when he did there was something pinched between two of his pale, tapered fingers.

"Do you have any idea what this is?" The client enquired. His voice gave away nothing of the intentions behind the question, so Takeshi decided to use his normal fallback: honesty.

"Maybe…silk?" He guessed, after another round of squinting. It almost looked like hair, except it shone pink in the lamplight. The girl in the trunk had black hair, and her kimono had been a soft, faded shade of olive green. "Maybe the old owner kept robes inside and something snagged," Takeshi theorized, nodding and giving himself a nice mental pat on the back for his excellent leap of logic.

"Perhaps so," said the client after a brief pause, his voice amused. "Well, that shall be all. Please be on your way."

Takeshi did so, frowning to himself at the lack of gratitude for Uncle Mochi's service, and left the client behind to rejoin Dai and continue on with their caravan. Had he stayed even a moment longer, he might have heard the client sigh in displeasure and might have even seen a trio of shinobi emerge from the shadows of the room.

"Remind me to reprimand Tayuya the next time I see her," the client might have said, shaking his head. "Leaving behind even this much of a trace of her handiwork is a _disgrace_."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama," one of the ninja securing the trunk might have said.

It was fortunate that Takeshi had _not_ lingered. While neither name meant anything thing to him in particular, having heard just one of them would have been enough to not only have ensured _his_ swift and brutal death, but Dai's as well. But both men lived, and trundled on down their route, because they still had more deliveries to make and Uncle Mochi did not employ slackers of any sort.

* * *

.

* * *

If even a month prior somebody had told Sasuke that he would spend days willingly cooped up in the lobby of the Hokage's Tower with his mostly one-sided rival, rather than actually going out to train, all for the sake of a girl he had once viewed as a massive thorn in his side, he would have…

Well, Sasuke wasn't quite sure what he might have done. Walked away, most likely. As it was, training was the last thing on his mind. He was loathe to admit that he was _worried_, but with the flurry of activity Kakashi's awakening and Ino's later rampage kicked up. She was here too, strangely, dropping by whenever she wasn't training with _her_ team. Sasuke might have taken issue with it, but she barely spoke to him; she just paced the room as restlessly as Naruto, leaving Sasuke with the disconcerting feeling of being trapped in a cage of lions.

No matter how long they waited or paced, however, nothing seemed to come of it. There was no new information about Sakura's whereabouts: nobody had seen her in her neighborhood, nobody had seen her shopping, nobody had seen her being dragged off, and no body had been found.

Naruto had _snarled_ the first time somebody had tried to use that last update to reassure them, like some kind of beast. Sasuke shared the sentiment, but it and their mounting stress had caused a veritable screaming match between Naruto and Ino as they had made their way home the first night.

It was the third day since actions had been taken to find Sakura, a full week since their original return, and Sasuke was still struggling with his own incomprehension. Kakashi had not shared—or perhaps, had not been _able_ to share—what had actually _happened_ to Sakura, but he had made it clear, once Sasuke and Naruto had fumbled through their theory, that the boys had been mistaken. The relief had hit both of them like a physical blow, but had left a hundred questions in its wake. If not that, then what? What could have diminished her so quickly, left her scared and crying in her sleep? What could have driven her to—leave?

Neither he nor Naruto believed that Sakura had…that she had chosen to _kill_ herself. It didn't seem possible. She was too soft, too maddeningly sentimental to do something like that with just a hug and a handful of flowers as afarewell. She could be dramatic, definitely, but she would have left a letter or something to _explain_ herself. She was too much of a bookworm not to at least leave that much, for her parents if nobody else.

The alternative situation, though only marginally less confusing and just as difficult to believe, was that Sakura had left the village on her own.

"…it doesn't make _sense_," Naruto said, apparently still stuck on the same thought-loop as Sasuke, rubbing a hand over his mouth while he crossed the room yet again. "I don't—why would she _want_ to leave? Why wouldn't she tell somebody?"

"I don't _know!_" Ino grumbled as her path met and crossed Naruto's circuit. "Forehead might have been implanted with a sleeper-seal or something, or maybe somebody gave her an ultimatum, or…"

"But she would have left a _message!_" Naruto insisted, turning sharply for the next round. "I mean, if she had time to pick out those flowers, she'd find a way to say she didn't want to go, right?"

"Stop _pacing_," Sasuke snapped at last, looking up sharply. Both blonds paused, taken aback by the venom in his voice. "And you both have points, but Kakashi and the rest aren't telling us something, so we _just don't know_." He ran a hand through his forelocks with an irritated grunt. "And Sakura didn't feel like telling us either, so until somebody feels like letting us in on the big secret, we're just going to be stuck like this. So don't go around in any more circles than we are already."

Naruto and Ino looked at the floor, before slowly sitting down. Ino was a bit too close for comfort, naturally, but Naruto seemed to be lost in thought again. It kept happening, but the shock value still hadn't worn off.

"Did something click?" Sasuke asked gruffly.

"Huh?" Naruto looked up, a little startled. "Nah, just…that 'big secret' thing made me think of something. It doesn't really fit, though."

"Well, let's hear it," Ino said with a sigh. "It can't be any crazier than some of the stuff we've thought about."

"Um." Naruto squirmed a bit. "That's the thing—it's kind of…you know…a big secret? Like, there's a law and everything, 'ttebayo. I only found out by accident."

"Well—" Sasuke began, before he was interrupted by a tired voice.

"Yamanaka, Asuma says to get to the training field," Kakashi said, slipping silently through a nearby window. If Naruto and Sasuke had been restless in their waiting and wondering, then Kakashi had been absolutely relentless in his search for their wayward teammate. Technically ex-teammate, perhaps, but neither Naruto nor Sasuke wanted to accept that, and Kakashi seemed even less inclined.

Ino grudgingly stood up and left, and Kakashi slumped down into her seat. "The Hokage is still classifying the complication with Sakura above your paygrade, boys," he sighed, but whether he approved or not was difficult to tell. "And we're officially working under the assumption that she is no longer in the village. Believe me, as soon as I can tell you anything more than that, I _will_ let you know."

"What are we gonna do if we don't find her, Sensei?" Naruto voiced the question that had been weighing on both of their minds. Maybe _all_ of their minds. "What if she _did_ want to leave on her own, and nobody took her?"

"We'll…" Their teacher paused. "We'll do what we can, I suppose. We might have to deal with a replacement teammate, depending on how long she's out of the system."

Naruto's hands fisted in his pants at the thought, and Sasuke found himself surprisingly opposed to the thought of a replacement. Sakura was annoying, but somehow she had become a normal part of his peripheral. He didn't _want_ a replacement, but he didn't want to stagnate and lose ground on Itachi either.

He gritted his teeth and hoped, somewhat vindictively, that wherever Sakura was she was in a good enough state to be facing a similarly difficult dilemma.

* * *

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* * *

Sakura stood at the side of the road, indisputably torn.

Since her arrival in River Country, she had been doing her best to lay low and ferret out her parents. Even though it was markedly smaller than her homeland, it was still quite a lot of ground to cover, and River Country apparently hit its rainy season a few months before Fire did which further limited her search. She scowled down at her muddy toes at the thought, before returning to the problem at hand.

After a day to get her bearings, and asking around at the small town that Uncle Mochi's man had directed her to, and then travelling to another nearby village to repeat the process, Sakura had found two very promising sites where her parents might have gone—and if they weren't there now, then at least it would be a lead. She was, however, left to deal with the dilemma of which to try first. Each seemed, to her, that it might be equally enticing to her father; one was an old temple towards River Country's border with Wind, which had been destroyed back during the First Shinobi War. It had probably been thoroughly picked over by now, but in the past her parents had returned from such ruins with rare and cleverly hidden relics.

On the other hand, however, was a rumored shrine deep in a thick forest not too far away from where she was now, which local legend said was haunted. Haruno Kizashi _lived_ to investigate hokey legends like that. He had been, in his youth, utterly enamored by the supernatural. It gave Sakura a bit of hope on the Isobu front.

After another moment of hemming and hawing over the map, during which she had to do her best to avoid dragging her fingers through her wig in frustration, she ultimately decided to try the shrine in the forest first. If worst come to worst, if she missed them one way or another, then she would still be somewhere between her parents and the village they had used as their home for the past decade or so.

Nodding to herself, she folded her map back up and tucked it away for safekeeping. It looked like it might drizzle later on, given the decidedly gray cast the sky was taking. She made sure her umbrella was in easy reach, as well.

While a wig was an easy disguise for her, lacking the vicious, expensively cyclic consequences of dye-jobs and touch-ups, Sakura had to take measures to cover up the body hair that couldn't be shaved or hidden beneath the wig. The long fabric of the simple, gently-used kimono she had purchased for her travel clothes managed to take care of her arms, and legs should it come to it, and a combination of dark eye-shadow brushed over her eyebrows and black mascara for her lashes took care of her face.

As long as she kept her face dry, that was. The mascara was definitely waterproof, but her eyebrows were the main weakness of the ensemble. The villagers she had spoken to hadn't noticed anything amiss about her appearance, and she had no reason to think that Konoha would immediately find her, but both she and Isobu had agreed, the last time they had a connection—which, incidentally, did not happen every time she went to sleep—that caution should be their watchword from now on. An unaffiliated, mostly noncombatant jinchuuriki was basically an oxymoron in today's world; possibly a first entirely.

Sakura _liked_ being first. Especially in this case.

If she wanted to find her parents, though, she needed to do less thinking and more walking. With one last glance at the sky and a soft sigh, Sakura readjusted her pack and continued down the fork in the road that would bring her to the rumored forest. She grimaced for the first few steps, unhappy with the squelch and pull beneath her soles. After years spent wearing the more formfitting, hardy sandals commonly sold in Hidden Villages, normal, cheaper sandals were an unpleasant step down, to put it lightly. She had been forced to shuck off the tabi she had originally worn once the first few showers had soaked them through and nearly caused her to turn an ankle.

Keeping the blue footware, however comfortable and versatile, however, would just end up making her stand out; if not as a shinobi, then as somebody who had been to a Hidden Village. And that was the sort of thing _all_ shinobi noticed, however subconsciously, and that just wasn't a chance that Sakura was prepared to take right now.

So she trudged on down the road for the next few hours, silent and aching for some sort of conversation or companionship—either chatter, or silence, just so long as she had _something_ to listen to aside from the clop of her own footsteps and the faint sounds of forest life filtering in from the trees and bushes. She followed the road even as it narrowed, dwindling down until it was little more than a path trodden through the thick, lush grass that was common to the area.

She could actually _feel_ the moment when she crossed the invisible, intangible border into the forest, because something deep inside her finally relaxed, instinctively at home amongst the thick, looming cage of trees surrounding her. For all that she was running away, she was still young and scared enough to embrace any semblance of _'home'_ at this point. If there was one thing any genin-hopeful of Konoha was well versed in, it was survival in a forest environment. The forest gave her a sorely needed illusion of control; here, at this moment, Sakura knew exactly what to do, how to navigate, how to locate a water source and even how to make shelter and set up camp if necessary.

After nearly a week of fumbling her way through the dark, terrifying straits of the unknown, it was a _very_ welcome breath of fresh air. A small one, perhaps, but welcome nonetheless.

It lightened her spirits and even managed to bolster a smile back onto her face for the first time since she left the second town. She made a game of picking out different plants and trying to identify them from her admittedly impressive memory, humming softly under her breath.

She was working on her fourth type of tree, working her way down from the Family when she realized, with a start, that the forest had gone unsettlingly silent around her. She forced herself to keep humming rather than give away her new awareness, keeping her pace even and unhurried. If it was a normal predator, she had a small multipurpose switchblade tucked into her obi that she could use, but if it was anything more skilled or intelligent closing in, she might have a problem.

After a few tense moments, she slowed her footsteps and let the humming taper off into silence, shifting so that her back was to a large specimen of the current type of tree she had been trying to identify.

Her only warning of what came next was a faint whistling.

A moment later, there was the soft thud of something sharp slicing through bark to catch in the rings of wood beneath, and her shriek split the air.

* * *

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_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,004

_**Total Word Count:**_ 27,450


	9. Engage

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own the series _Naruto_ or any of the characters or concepts connected to it. I also have no claim to the various folk-tales that will be mentioned.

* * *

**ONCE AND AFTER**

* * *

Interlude: Engage

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* * *

_Once upon a time there was a little boy raised by an old couple and attended by animals, and a clan of battle-loving demons that were exterminated._

_Those events were both less and more connected than one might think, though._

* * *

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* * *

Boy only had scattered, fragmented memories of the time he spent outside of the forest. Most of them were part of the long, half-delirious journey that had led him to the Old Woman and the Old Man. Before that was mostly darkness, occasionally peppered with the appearance of the pale, red-marked face of a woman, or a man. He vaguely recalled that he had liked the woman more than the man, even if she had always seemed sad. It was better than the man—he had yelled or laughed, his voice as grating as a crow's caw.

But for a long period, neither had appeared, and Boy had crawled from the darkness into a world of decay and blood. There were many men and women there, though death and time had made them less pale and far more red-marked. Boy hadn't fully understood death then, but had instinctively shied away from the corpses. They were strewn out from the large complex all the way to the battlefield where most of them had met their end, and Boy had stumbled off in the opposite direction.

The journey between the darkness and the forest wasn't something he liked to think about, and was largely disjointed from hunger and sensory overload. There was a time he nearly collapsed, limp and listless beneath a tree. There had been a flower there, prettier than any other he had seen during his short stint of freedom, and he had thought that he might have liked to stay there with it.

But something within him, something primal, had screamed out that he must not stop. And so Boy staggered on.

Just when he had nearly been pushed past his limits, Boy had found a stream, where he drank deeply and desperately, and a tree bearing sweet fruits, as pink as the flower he had left behind had been. Boy hadn't known what a peach was back then, only that it was the sweetest, most delicious thing he could have possibly dreamed of. He followed the stream for days and days, finding trees and bushes bearing fruit—some were filling, some made him so dizzy he fell to his knees and retched, but none were as sweet as the peaches.

Eventually the stream thickened into a proper, if meager stream, and it wound around a massive tree, bearing more peaches. Boy had felt so happy he might have cried—he no longer remembered—and ate his fill before falling asleep at the base of the trunk.

Boy had awoken to the Old Man prodding him with his walking stick, and that had been the beginning of everything. The Old Man had Taken Boy to his home, which he shared with his wife, the Old Woman. They called each other 'husband' or 'wife', and took Boy as their own. With them, Boy flourished. Boy was young and weak from his time in the darkness, but the journey to the forest and helping in the garden that the couple tended for themselves helped him grow healthier and stronger.

The Old Man and the Old Woman were gone now, the former in his sleep several years ago, when the boy was perhaps twelve or so. Boy had taken care of the Old Woman and the garden, but had felt a hole in his life open up. He filled it with the less aggressive animals of the forest, who seemed to take to him easily. The Old Woman had finally reunited with her husband a few months ago, and Boy had felt another hole open up; he tried to fill it with more animals, keeping a small monkey he had found floating wounded in the river by his side, more time in the garden, expanding his crop, more peaches to take away the bitterness creeping in, but the new hole would not be filled.

Boy had begun wondering if he should try to find a new Old Man and Old Woman to belong to, but something within him lashed out angrily at the thought. He didn't _want_ anybody to replace them—he didn't think anybody ever _could_. But he didn't know what else to do.

He had woken up this morning with the same slow-burning frustration, and had once again failed to channel it out through working in his field. It had only left him hungry on top of frustrated, no matter how the monkey or any of the other animals tried to cheer him up. He had finally trudged off to hunt for the night's dinner, slipping through the forest with practiced ease.

The other denizens of the forest seemed agitated, but Boy himself was too agitated to pay them much mind. He found a suitably large bird pecking around at the ground, and crouched down behind a bush. Slowly, he raised his arm, bracing it at the elbow with his other hand and narrowing his eyes in concentration. Unfortunately, the monkey clambered up to perch on the top of his head, chattering curiously at whatever had taken Boy's attention so thoroughly.

The bird took flight and Boy murmured one of the Old Man's favorite curses beneath his breath, feeling the skin of his extended palm split painlessly and letting the bone arrow fly.

It was Boy's special trait; neither he nor his caretakers had ever fully understood it. The explanation they had settled on had been Old Man's theory, that based on Boy's pale hair and red markings—specifically the two upon his brow—was that Boy had some measure of oni blood within him, but could sheath his horns and other inhuman traits at will. They had not cared much, being satisfied with having a child, no matter what his lineage. Largely, Boy only used his inhuman abilities to make tools or cutlery, such as in this case.

He noticed, with some satisfaction, that the arrow had still manage to hit home, catching the bird in mid-air and dragging it along thanks to the spikes he had produced on the shaft. Boy's projectiles always flew at a bizarrely high speed, so it generally took him a while to find his fallen prey. This time, however, his task was made easy—by a high, entirely _human_ scream of alarm.

Boy ran.

In all his years in the forest, he had never met another human, aside from the Old Man and the Old Woman. Every few years, the Old Man would make a trek out of the forest for supplies they could not grow or make on their own, but Boy had always stayed behind. The Old Woman had said that most people avoided the forest because the shrine it housed was rumored to be haunted, but had simply smiled and shook her head when Boy had asked her why the couple had decided to live there despite that.

He felt his hard begin to beat harder with each step as he leapt over bushes and ducked the odd, low-hanging branch in his way. He finally reached a break in the trees, and stopped short, realizing at the back of his mind that he had hit the path that the Old Man had taken out of the forest in the past. The lion's share of his attention, however, was entirely focused on the girl sprawled on the ground beneath the tree his dinner was pinned against.

Her chest was heaving, and her eyes—green, like Boy's, but a different shade—were wide enough to show the white all around. Her hair was long and dark, like the Old Woman said hers had been during her youth, and she was…she—she reminded Boy, suddenly, of the flower he had first seen all those years ago.

"_What the hell?!" _

She was much louder than the flower had been, however_._ Boy straightened when her slightly less alarmed gaze landed upon him, and noticed the color slowly return to her face, with interest.

"Sorry, miss," he said softly, closing the distance between them and crouching to offer his hand. "Normally, folks don't stray in here. Didn't mean to scare you." Her eyes trailed down and her cheeks flushed, and he remembered belatedly that he had forgone his shirt for the day, as the warmth of the coming summer seemed to have arrived early this year. He was immediately conscious of his appearance, and tilted his head so that his long, shoulder-length hair the top-half of his face and his markings. He couldn't do much more than that to make himself less intimidating, as he had grown into a particularly tall young man by the grace of the Old Man's chores and the Old Woman's food, and there was no hiding his bone-white hair itself.

The monkey, bless its little heart, helped diffuse the situation. It skittered down his extended arm and gripped his extended hand for balance as it leaned in to study the fallen girl, chittering excitedly.

It earned a strained giggle from the girl, and Boy offered his other hand with a smile of his own. The girl accepted it, and he heaved her up. Even with the large pack on her back, it wasn't very difficult at all. The Old Woman hadn't been very heavy either, at the end. Boy thought it might be a woman-thing.

"Thanks," she said, jumping a little when the monkey abandoned Boy's hand and clambered up the sleeve of her kimono to investigate her more actively. She gently caught its tiny hand in hers before it could grab a lock of her hair with surprising swiftness, and Boy quickly plucked it off of her and cradled it against his shoulder with a firm hand. He could hear every petulant grumble it made, but kept his attention on the girl.

"Sorry," he repeated. "Like I said, we…_I_ don't get many visitors here."

She smiled, now much more composed, apparently having forgiven him for startling her. "Because of the legend? I was actually hoping to find some people who might have come here to investigate that…"

Boy frowned. "Well, I haven't really noticed anybody…but they might have taken a route in from another part of the forest." He added, not liking the way her face seemed to crumble in disappointment. "I'm the only one that lives here now, aside from the animals. I might've missed them."

"Would you mind giving me directions?" Even on the off chance that he did, Boy wasn't sure there was a person alive that could say no to such an eager, hopeful face.

"I could bring you there," he offered, but after a quick look at the sky amended, "tomorrow, maybe. The forest isn't somewhere you want to be stumbling around in the dark."

"Well…" The girl hesitated, noticeably wary.

"I'll split dinner, since it gave you some grief," he offered, leaning forward to tug the bird that started it all loose from the tree. Just seeing another person seemed to soften the ache left by the loss of his caretakers, so maybe sharing a meal would further salve the wound.

The girl carefully considered the offer, smoothing her hand over her obi as she thought it over. Eventually she nodded. "I'll take you up on that, if it isn't too much trouble."

"It isn't," he assured her, his normal reticence helping him mask the happiness that spiked through him. "Follow me."

* * *

.

* * *

Sakura eyed the back of the older boy leading her through the forest, and fought back a blush as she saw the muscles bunch and ripple beneath the lightly tanned skin. While she definitely still loved Sasuke-kun, no matter how much of Isobu's fear bled in at even the _thought_ of an Uchiha, she wasn't blind. The hunter boy was attractive, white, messy hair and all.

She had initially thought he might be a ninja, perhaps on leave from Taki, but when she took his hand she found that the callouses had been arranged in the wrong places. She was still a little wary, considering that she was being led through a strange forest by a strange boy who hadn't even asked for her name, let alone offered his own.

Furthermore, the arrow speared through the dead pheasant confused her. It looked different from wood—she would almost say it looked as though it had been carved from _bone_, except the spikes on the shaft looked far too smooth for a carving job.

So, she _probably_ wasn't following an unfairly attractive cannibal to his lair, and if she was then at least she had her knife in easy reach. The monkey helped bolster her confidence, at least.

"Here we are," the hunter said, pulling back a branch so that she could step into the clearing. Instead of following the path, as she had been doing, he had led her through the forest, patiently waiting whenever her pace was impeded by the length of her kimono or the girth of her bag. Sakura paused once she had done so, taking in the cozy little set up before them.

There was a small, rustic house, complete with a surprisingly extensive garden. On the opposite side of the man-made clearing, she saw what seemed, from the stones stacked there, to be two graves. The grass had grown in from what she could see, so she thankfully let go of the cannibal theory.

"You live here all by yourself?" She asked as they made their way to the house, struggling to find the least offensive phrasing for what she really wanted to ask.

"The old man and woman who took me in died," her guide revealed easily. "So yes."

"Ah." Sakura fiddled with her sleeves awkwardly, ducking her head in thanks when he opened the door for her. "I…see. I'm sorry for your loss."

"They're together now, so it's fine." The hunter shrugged the shoulder that he wasn't cradling the monkey against, and made his way over to the part of the cabin that served as the kitchen. There was a firepit, which fascinated her, but she let her attention wander when he began to pluck his catch.

The place looked lived-in, without any dust or detritus to imply that it had been abandoned. The height-cataloging notches in the door jam also served to validate the teen's story, and Sakura finally allowed herself to relax a little. Her eyes cut to a door that creaked open, but it was only a dog, scruffy white and curly-tailed, ambling out from what appeared to be a bedroom. There was a cot out here in the front room that was messily covered in pillows and blankets.

"Sorry about the mess." She turned back to the hunter, whose head was bowed as he continued to prepare the fowl. The knife in his grip gleamed white, just as the arrow had, but she shelved that question for the moment.

"No, thank you for the offer," she said, bending down to take off her pack. She offered her closed fist for the dog to snuffle over, and then gently scratched his ears after getting an approving lick across her knuckles. She glanced back at the 'kitchen' and noticed the bundles of herbs hanging down from the low ceiling. "Is it okay if I help? I hate feeling like a free-loader." And her flagging but still-present paranoia bade her to watch what was going into her food, just in case.

The hunter looked up, a little surprised from what she could tell from the half of his face that wasn't obscured. After a brief moment of hesitation, he nodded and shuffled further in to make room for her.

* * *

.

* * *

Boy ate, and could not remember a better meal since the death of the Old Woman. Whether that was because of the presence of the girl sitting across the table from him or because of the seasoning suggestions she had made was anybody's guess, but he personally believed that it was a mixture of both.

She finished off her rice first, but Boy was a close second, and Shiro, the dog the Old Man had brought back to the forest not long before his death, had been licking his bowl clean almost as soon as it had been set before him. The monkey was on its second peach of the night, and happy as could be.

"So," said the girl. "We never really introduced ourselves."

Boy held back a sigh, having expected this question. "I…don't remember the name I was born under," he said after a long sip of water. "And The Old Man and the Old Woman were of a mind that it was wrong to rename a child. So they just called me their Boy."

The girl's eyebrows rose slightly. "You mean, like…they'd say things like, 'Good work, my boy,' or something like that when they talked to you?" He nodded, and the eyebrows lowered again. "Hm…well, to be fair I can't really give you _my_ birth name either." She tapped her chopsticks against the rim of her bowl thoughtfully, before pausing, as if struck by a thought. Her lips curled into a half-smile. "Would it be okay if I used a name for you?"

"I don't mind," he said. If she gave him a name it meant she would be around him long enough to use it, after all.

"Great." She looked up, and her eyes sparkled a little with a joke he didn't fully comprehend. "Then I'll call you Momotaro, and you can call me Urashimako."

"Like the stories?" The newly named Momotaro asked, turning it over in his mind. Something about the rhythm and cadence of it sounded familiar; perhaps it resembled his birth name in some manner.

"Like the stories," Urashimako agreed.

Momotaro could grasp where _his_ name came from, given the animals she had seen him with so far, but her own confused him. There were other, feminine stories she could have chosen—but perhaps he was thinking too deeply, and her decision had been made on a much simpler basis.

Perhaps, he thought, as he rose and gathered their dirty plates, she was just a girl who liked turtles.

* * *

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* * *

_**Chapter Word Count:**_ 3,055

_**Total Word Count:**_ 30,505


End file.
